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 […]

Being exceptional in higher dimensions

Nanowerk  July 1, 2020 By connecting electromagnetic waves and magnetism to create a system made of magnon polaritons an international team of researchers (USA- Argonne National Laboratory, UK) has demonstrated the existence of an “exceptional surface”. Through experiments, they have shown that EPs form a three-dimensional exceptional surface (ES) when the system is tuned in a four-dimensional synthetic space. They found that an exceptional saddle point (ESP) exists in the ES which originates from the unique couplings between magnons and microwave photons. It exhibits unique anisotropic behaviors in both the real and imaginary parts of the eigenfrequencies. The findings open […]

Jumping the gap may make electronics faster

Science Daily  September 26, 2019 According to an international team of researchers (India, USA – Pennsylvania State University) surface-plasmon-polariton (SPP) waves guided by the interface of the two materials can continue propagating even if the metal wire has a break or the metal dielectric interface terminates abruptly. The SPP wave can travel in air for a few 10s of micrometers or the equivalent of 600 transistors laid end to end in a 14 nanometer technology chips. As waves are localized, signal delay and crosstalk may be reduced using optical interconnections based on SPP waves. The problem with using SPP waves […]

Coupled exploration of light and matter

Science Daily  July 15, 2019 Polaritonics is based on the strong coupling of photons to atomic or electronic excitations in an optical resonator. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, France) describes experiments which indicate that, in addition to strong correlations in the electronic ground state, exciton–electron interactions leading to the formation of polaron-polaritons have a key role in enhancing the nonlinear optical response of the system. The research opened fresh perspectives for exploring both ingredients of the polariton, novel functionalities for photonic devices and fundamental insight into exotic states of matter…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

A polariton filter turns ordinary laser light into quantum light

Phys.org  February 19, 2016 An international team of researchers (Australia, France) used nanometre-thick films made of gallium arsenide and sandwiched them between two mirrors to manipulate the incoming photons. The photons interact with electron-hole pairs in the semiconductor, forming polaritons that carry properties from both the photons and the electron-hole pairs. The polaritons decay after a few picoseconds, and the photons they release exhibit distinct quantum signatures. While these quantum signatures are weak at the moment, the work opens a new avenue for producing single photons on demand. Once they are able to increase the strength of the quantum signatures, […]