MIT News February 15, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Harvard University, Princeton University, NITS, University of Chicago) has observed groups of three photons interacting and, in effect, sticking together to form a completely new kind of photonic matter. In controlled experiments, the researchers found that when they shone a very weak laser beam through a dense cloud of ultracold rubidium atoms, rather than exiting the cloud as single, randomly spaced photons, the photons bound together in pairs or triplets, suggesting some kind of interaction — in this case, attraction — taking place among them. According to […]
Tag Archives: Photonics
New exotic phenomena seen in photonic crystals
MIT News January 11, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Yale University) used a method that made these open systems accessible and found two specific kinds of effects that are distinctive topological signatures of non-Hermitian systems. One of these is a kind of band feature they refer to as a bulk Fermi arc, and the other is an unusual kind of changing polarization emitted by the photonic crystal used for the study. Most of the potential real-world applications for photonic crystals involve open systems, so the new observations made by this team could open new areas of […]