Science Daily June 10, 2024 A resonantly excited atomic optical dipole simultaneously generates propagating (far) and evanescent (near) electromagnetic fields. The near-field component diverges in the limit of decreasing distance, indicating an optical antenna with the potential for enormous near-field intensity enhancement. In principle, any atomic optical dipole in a solid can serve as an optical antenna; however, most of them suffer from environmentally induced decoherence that largely mitigates field enhancement. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Spain) demonstrated that germanium vacancy centres in diamond are exemplary antennas. They measured up to million-fold […]
Tag Archives: Optical antennas
Light unbound: Data limits could vanish with new optical antennas
UC Berkeley February 25, 2021 The quantum Hall effect involves electrons confined to a two-dimensional plane subject to a perpendicular magnetic field, but it also has a photonic analogue. Using heterostructures based on structured semiconductors on a magnetic substrate, a team of researchers in the US (UC San Diego, UC Berkeley) introduced compact and integrated coherent light sources of large orbital angular momenta based on the photonic quantum Hall effect. The photonic quantum Hall effect enables the direct and integrated generation of coherent orbital angular momenta beams of large quantum numbers from light travelling in leaky circular orbits at the […]