Experiment takes ‘snapshots’ of light, stops light, uses light to change properties of matter

Phys.org  December 23, 2020
An international team of researchers (USA – University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Japan, Taiwan) trapped surface plasmon polaritons of green light and imaged their propagation on a silver surface at the speed of light so that the light waves came together from two sides to form a light vortex. They took electron microscope images of the emitted electrons to make a snapshot. The light vortex fields can potentially cause transitions in the quantum mechanical phase order in solid state materials, such that the transformed material structure and its mirror image cannot be superimposed. In other words, the sense of the vortex rotation generates two materials that are topologically distinct. Even the forces of nature including light, are thought to have emerged as symmetry breaking transitions of a primordial field. Thus, the ability to record the optical fields and plasmonic vortices in the experiment opens the way to perform ultrafast microscopy studies of related light-initiated phase transitions in condensed matter materials at the laboratory scale…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Credit: Petr Kratochvil/public domain

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