Phys.org March 4, 2022
The prospect of controlling the electronic properties of materials via the vacuum fields of cavity electromagnetic resonators is emerging as one of the frontiers of condensed matter physics. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, France) found that the enhancement of vacuum field fluctuations in subwavelength split-ring resonators strongly affects the quantum Hall electron transport in high-mobility two-dimensional electron gases. The observed breakdown of the topological protection of the integer quantum Hall effect is interpreted in terms of a long-range cavity-mediated electron hopping where the anti-resonant terms of the light-matter coupling develop into a finite resistivity induced by the vacuum fluctuations. According to the researchers their experimental platform can be used for any two-dimensional material and provides a route to manipulate electron phases in matter by means of vacuum-field engineering…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE  1 , 2 , 3
Experimental setup for the temporal and spatial electro-optic field correlation on vacuum and thermal fields. Credit: Nature volume 568, pages202–206 (2019)Â