Co-author Professor Sir John Pendry said, "The double time slits experiment opens the door to a whole new spectroscopy capable of resolving the temporal structure of a light pulse on the scale of one period of the radiation."
Interview with the lead researcher
A light cycle of 794 femtoseconds corresponds to a wavelength of approximately 1500 nanometers, which falls within the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum....
Here, we find unexpected physics: many more
oscillations are visible than expected from existing theory, implying a rise time for the
leading edge estimated to be 1-10 fs, i.e. of the order of an optical cycle (4.4 fs)
a single-cycle light
pulse with a duration of 4.3 femtoseconds
in the near-infrared range.... to generate
a single-cycle pulse of light, and this could
be used as a carrier of digital information at
telecommunications wavelengths. The pulse
duration of 4.3 femtoseconds corresponds
to a potential data transmission rate of over
100 terabits per second for a single optical
fibre.
Thus the uncertainty principle, applied to the spectrum in Figure (1b) correctly predicts the length of the laser pulse..The clear prediction of Equation (4) is that every time we double the length Δt of the pulse, we will cut the energy uncertainty ΔE in half.
the obstacles to the light’s propagation were separated in time.... When it is hit with a powerful laser beam, it goes from being almost entirely transparent to briefly reflecting most of the light that hits it....the researchers used two consecutive laser pulses to turn the material reflective while also shining a less powerful “probe” laser at it. The light from the probe laser passed through the material during times when it was not reflective, and bounced back when it hit simultaneously with a laser pulse.
When they measured the light that bounced back, the researchers found similar interference patterns to those seen in the classic version of the experiment, but this time in the frequency of the light, which determines its colour, rather than in its brightness... the light enters at one frequency and comes out at many frequencies,” says Sapienza.
the rise-decay asymmetry of the time slit and the Doppler shift of the diffracted
light. Time diffraction requires a time slit modulation fast enough to develop frequency
oscillations that decay slowly, over frequencies larger than the probe bandwidth, as we show
here.
Moreover, the oscillations are very close to the asymptotic limit of an ideal time slit with a
Heaviside (infinitely fast) rise profile, for which the amplitude of the oscillations is expected
to decay as 1/(f-f0)2, where f is the frequency of oscillation and f0 the probe central frequency
(230.2 THz). This is evident when the spectrum is rescaled by the inverse frequency squared,
as its intensity is almost constant (Fig. 2C-D). The dashed purple line in Fig. 2C-D is the
asymptotic theory with two Heaviside time slits (see Fig. S2).
The number of oscillations depends on the sharpness of the material’s transition from transparent to reflective, so this means that the material was responding to the laser pulses with incredible speed – within a few femtoseconds of the pulse. One femtosecond is one-millionth of one-billionth of a second.
[Meaning because it was so sharp in time, therefore there was a broad range of frequency wave spread]
“The material response is 10 to 100 times faster than expected, and that was a big surprise,” says Sapienza. “We were hoping to see a few oscillations, and we saw many.”
That quick transition time could be useful for making time crystals, which are strange materials with moving structures that repeat over and over again.
the time slits in the new experiment change the frequency of the light, which alters its colour. This created colours of light that interfere with each other, enhancing and cancelling out certain colours to produce an interference-type pattern.
Co-author Professor Sir John Pendry said: "The double time slits experiment opens the door to a whole new spectroscopy capable of resolving the temporal structure of a light pulse on the scale of one period of the radiation."
‘Double-slit time diffraction at optical frequencies’ by Romain Tirole, Stefano Vezzoli, Emanuele Galiffi, Iain Robertson, Dries Maurice, Benjamin Tilmann, Stefan A. Maier, John B. Pendry and Riccardo Sapienza is published in Nature Physics.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-01993-w
whereas the decay of fringe visibility in frequency reveals the shape of the time slits
Our team, led by Riccardo Sapienza at Imperial College London, fired light through a material that changes its properties in femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), only allowing light to pass through at specific times in quick succession.
We still saw interference patterns, but instead of showing up as bands of bright and dark, they showed up as changes in the frequency or color of the beams of light.
We had a transparent screen that became a mirror for two brief instants, creating the equivalent of two slits in time.
However, the wave nature of the process means the photon is in a sense reflected by both temporal slits. This creates interference, and a varying pattern of color in the light that reaches the detector.
The amount of change in color is related to how fast the mirror changes its reflectivity. These changes must be on timescales comparable with the length of a single cycle of a light-wave, which is measured in femtoseconds.
we can transfer concepts such as interference from the domain of space to the domain of time.
a beam of light twice gated in time produces an interference in the frequency spectrum.
inducing a fast reflectivity rise, followed by a slower decay. Separation between the time slits determines the period of oscillations in the frequency spectrum, while the decay of fringe visibility in frequency reveals the shape of the time slits.
Therefore, femto is a smaller unit than pico by a factor of 1000
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04362
many more oscillations are visible than expected from existing theory, implying a rise time for the leading edge of around 1-10 fs, approaching an optical cycle of 4.4 fs. This is over an order of magnitude faster than the width of the pump and can be inferred from the decay of the frequency oscillations.
The observation of temporal Young’s double-slit diffraction paves the way for optical realizations of time-varying metamaterials, promising enhanced wave functionalities such as nonreciprocity (18),
related to the rise-decay asymmetry of the time slit and the Doppler shift of the diffracted
light. Time diffraction requires a time slit modulation fast enough to develop frequency
oscillations that decay slowly, over frequencies larger than the probe bandwidth, as we show here.
The asymmetric interferogram is explained by the time evolution of the phase of the complex reflection coefficient, causing a Doppler shift of the spectrum, often dubbed time refraction
consists of a deeply subwavelength slab characterized by a time-varying dielectric function which is an aperture function A(t) defining two time slits (Fig. 1D). In this case the wave will be time-diffracted into a frequency spectrum of frequencies Aഥ(ω),
subwavelength waveguides
In contrast, the temporal analogue involves fixed momentum but changing frequency. A material in which two slits rapidly appear and then disappear, one after the other, should cause incoming waves to maintain their path in space but spread out in frequency – so-called time diffraction. The frequency spectrum would be the Fourier transform of the function describing the slits in time, with interference between waves at different frequencies
A femtosecond cycle of light
refers to the time it takes for light to travel the length of a single
wave cycle, which is incredibly short, around 2 femtoseconds (2 x 10^-15
seconds) for visible light. This is about the time it takes light to travel 300 nanometers, a distance comparable to the size of a virus. 300 nanometers corresponds to ultraviolet (UV) light... A single cycle of a 10 femtosecond light pulse corresponds to a wavelength of approximately 30 nanometers (30 nm). 30 nm corresponds to the X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum. A wave with an 800 nm wavelength λ has a period
T = λ /c of 2.67 femtoseconds.
https://www.physics2000.com/PDF/Non-CalcText/Ch33QMIIINonCalculus.pdf
Digital signals use amplitude because they represent information as discrete levels, often binary (0 or 1), where amplitude corresponds to the level or value of the signal. This is unlike analog signals which continuously vary in both amplitude and time.
be time-diffracted into a frequency spectrum of frequencies Aഥ(ω), the Fourier transform of the aperture function A(t), around the incident carrier frequency (Fig. 1E), whereas the in-plane momentum݇ ௫ will be conserved by translational symmetry (Fig. 1F).
Measuring the spectrum of the reflected probe pulses, Tirole and co-workers found that the pulses’ initial bandwidth was stretched by about a factor of ten. Crucially, that spectrum contained a series of peaks that became progressively smaller further from the pulse’s central carrier frequency. What’s more, they found that those peaks got further apart the shorter the delay between the pump pulses.
And just as the fringes in a conventional double-slit experiment become more spread out in space when the slits are closer together, so too in this experiment they got further away in frequency terms when the slits were nearer to one another in time.
While the size of the fringes closely matched theoretical predictions, their staying power came as a surprise – the peaks further from the central frequency being more pronounced than expected. This slow decay, the researchers say, indicates that the indium tin oxide responds more quickly to the leading edge of the slit pulses – taking less than 10 femtoseconds (10-14 s) to do so. This they point out is comparable with the length of one optical cycle of the infrared radiation they were using.
They achieved this by firing light through a material that changes its properties in femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), only allowing light to pass through at specific times in quick succession. The material responded much quicker than the team expected to the laser control, varying its reflectivity in a few femtoseconds.
The material is a metamaterial—one that is engineered to have properties not found in nature. Such fine control of light is one of the promises of metamaterials, and when coupled with spatial control, could create new technologies and even analogs for studying fundamental physics phenomena like black holes.
But he adds that the phenomenon they have observed should also be a feature of other types of waves – such as radiofrequency, terahertz or acoustic – and that as such this novel type of diffraction should “impact many technologies”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269321003129Light can also be parceled up into "particles" called photons, which can be recorded hitting the detector one at a time, gradually building up the striped interference pattern. Even when researchers fired just one photon at a time, the interference pattern still emerged, as if the photon split in two and traveled through both slits.
In the classic version of the experiment, light emerging from the physical slits changes its direction, so the interference pattern is written in the angular profile of the light. Instead, the time slits in the new experiment change the frequency of the light, which alters its color. This created colors of light that interfere with each other, enhancing and canceling out certain colors to produce an interference-type pattern.
Emergence of a discrete time, which is one of the main points of this paper is fascinating. Its origin goes back to no less than C.N. Yang in 1947 [16], or even earlier to Levi [17] who coined the term “Chronon”. Discrete time also appeared in 2+1 gravity thanks to the work of 't Hooft [18] (see also [19]). The point of view presented here is however novel, in that it connects to deformed symmetries and a promising quantum space.We study the kinematics of this noncommutative space using the tools developed for usual quantum mechanics, namely quantise the space associating to it an algebra of operators,Of course α is itself periodic of period 2π. This however means that a different choice of selfadjointess domain has been made. Time translations are undeformed, and two time-translated observers will be in different, but equivalent domains. A given observer, nevertheless, can only measure quantized time intervals.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/nanoph-2023-0126/html
increasing the refractive index abruptly
leads to time-refraction where the spectrum of all the waves
propagating in the medium is red-shifted, and subsequently
blue-shifted when the refractive index relaxes back to its
original value.
Time-refraction optics with single cycle modulation
Moreover, by shortening the temporal width
of the modulator to ∼5–6 fs, we observe that the rise time
of the red-shift associated with time-refraction is propor-
tionally shorter. The experiments are carried out in trans-
parent conducting oxides acting as epsilon-near-zero mate-
rials. These observations raise multiple questions on the
fundamental physics occurring within such ultrashort time
frames, and open the way for experimenting with photonic
time-crystals, generated by periodic ultrafast changes to the
refractive index, in the near future.
a sudden change in the real part of the refractive index
n(t), it undergoes two fundamental process – time refrac-
tion, and time reflection [13]. In this process of temporal
modulation of the EM properties of the medium, the energy
carried by the propagating wave (“probe”) is not conserved,
but when the medium is homogeneous the wave momen-
tum (wave-vector) is conserved (see, e.g., Ref. [14]). That is,
the time-refracted wave and the time-reflected wave have
the same wave-vector as the original wave propagating in
the medium. Consequently, when the refractive index is
increased abruptly – the spectrum of the wave undergoes
a red-shift, and when the index is decreased the spectrum
undergoes a blue-shift. This spectral shift occurs in both
time-refraction and time-reflection.
The lack of energy conservation in suchRed, ~ 700–635 nm, ~ 2.3–2.1 fs.
time-modulated EM media implies that the scattered wave may even be more energetic than the incident one [19], and can lead to tremendous amplification of waves by the
modulation
A femtosecond is equal to 1000 attoseconds, or 1/1000 picosecond.
Conventional nonlinear optics that relies on interaction between light and bound
electrons is ultrafast, but orders of magnitude too weak for observing time-reflection and PTCs.
Concatenating several time-modulations periodically can lead to the for-
mation of wide momentum gaps, and the system acts as a
photonic time-crystal (PTC) [2, 3, 29–31]. The gaps in momen-
tum of a PTC, where the temporal frequency is complex,
can lead to broadband parametric amplification, and can
interact with the emission of radiation by free electrons [32],
atoms [4] and classical dipoles [4]. All of these rely on the
ability to induce time-interfaces: very large changes in the
EM properties of materials occurring at single wave-cycle
rates.
concatenation as a sum of 2 piecewise signals. The "appended" signal is zero for the duration of the original signal.
This broad band non-resonant shift of the entire spectrum is
expected to occur when a large index change (real or imag-
inary) is induced. However, the properties of this shift and
how it evolves, especially down to the single-cycle regime,
have never been studied. Each plot in Figure 3 shows a
red-shift (increasing wavelength) and blue-shift (decreasing
wavelength). The red-shift occurs when the probe experi-
ences an increase in the refractive index which leads to
decrease in its frequency, which we measure as an increase
in the vacuum wavelength when light exits the sample.
Likewise, the blue-shift occurs when the probe experiences
a decrease in the refractive index. Interestingly, as shown
in Figure 3, there is a region of delay values where the
red-shift and blue-shift occur simultaneously for the same
probe pulse. This region of simultaneous red and blue fre-
quency shifts occurs because the probe pulse and refractive
index response have similar durations, while the time it
takes for the probe pulse to pass through the sample (on
the order of 1 fs) is much shorter. Hence, in these experi-
ments, the leading edge of the pulse experiences an increas-
ing refractive index and is therefore red-shifted, whereas
the trailing edge experiences only decreasing index and is blue-shifted. In addition, under this set of parameters, the
center of the probe pulse – which experiences both increase
and decrease of the refractive index – is negligible, and
therefore the original peak of the spectrum disappears for
these delay values.
. Those [previous experiment] suggestions were based on the argument that the relaxation mechanism relies largely on phonons...We can therefore say with high
confidence that the relaxation time of 20–30 fs has a physical origin, and is not related to the measurement system.
Vacuum wavelength refers to the wavelength of a wave, such as light, when it is traveling in a vacuum (a space devoid of matter). It is the fundamental wavelength, as it's not affected by any refractive index of a medium.
the time it takes for the probe
to pass through the sample is shorter than the rise time
of the refractive index, the spectral red-shift depends on
how much refractive index change the probe pulse experi-
ences before leaving the sample. Intuitively, we can approx-
imate the frequency shift to the ratio between the refrac-
tive index the wave experiences when it enters the sam-
ple and the refractive index it experiences when it leaves
the sample. Under this approximation, it is clear that for
thin samples (time of the probe to pass the sample < rise
time of the index) the spectral red-shift will depend on the
rise time of the index (which is related to the modulator
width through Eq. (2)). This implies that, for long modu-
lator pulses (long rise-time of the index) the probe will
experience a smaller index change while traveling through
the sample (and therefore smaller spectral red-shift) than
with short modulator pulses.
pave the way for observing photonic time crystals at optical frequencies, and many other phenomena involving time
boundaries.
https://opg.optica.org/ome/fulltext.cfm?uri=ome-14-5-1222&id=548824
For instance, wave propagation in homogeneous time-varying media conserves the momentum of light, while frequency changes [3,6], the dual with respect to wave propagation in space-varying time-invariant linear media. Moreover, an abrupt change of the medium’s properties induces the generation of reflected and refracted waves [7,8], whereas a periodic modulation of the refractive index can lead to parametric amplification effects [4,9–11]. (Interestingly, these amplification phenomena have recently been connected with parity-time symmetry and related concepts [7,12]). Scattering by finite objects with time-modulated material properties has also been recently studied [13,14], in parallel with the analysis of time-varying electric and magnetic dipoles and dipolar meta-atoms [15,16]; in these scenarios, the scattering/radiation process leads to harmonic generation via the coupling of the incident field with the Floquet dynamics of the scatterer’s time-periodic refractive index and the corrective radiation terms of the modulated dipole moments, respectively.
As in the time-invariant case, Eqs. (17)–(20) imply that the time-varying absorption losses of a temporal metamaterial are deeply related to the real part of the susceptibility and therefore to propagation/refraction properties (and their frequency dispersion), and vice versa. If the imaginary part of the temporal susceptibility is a separable function, such that , then the real part is also a separable function and has the same time dependence as the imaginary part. This means that if the time-varying absorption properties of the material (e.g., a transparent conducting oxide under an optical pump) can be represented as a separable function, then the refractive index of the material would change as quickly, and with the same temporal profile, as the dynamical change of its absorption.
So
Dispersion diagram (Brillouin diagram) near the first momentum band-gap of a photonic time-crystal. Solid and dotted lines represent, respectively, the real and imaginary parts of the eigenfrequency, normalized by the modulation frequency . Dashed lines correspond to the light cones for wave propagation in a time-invariant material with effective permittivity equal to eff . The parameter is the coefficient of the first harmonic of the Fourier series of . The figure is reprinted with permission from [10] © 2022 Optica Publishing Group.
These relations indicate that the real and imaginary parts of these specific nonlinear susceptibilities, for a fixed pump at or , are connected as a result of the principle of causality (and assuming again square integrability [61]). Similarly to the linear case [64], we speculate that these relations, together with relevant sum rules, could potentially be used to derive limits and trade-offs on nonlinear processes relevant for optical time-varying systems.
https://opg.optica.org/aop/fulltext.cfm?uri=aop-16-4-958&id=564632
photonic time crystals: artificial materials whose electromagnetic properties are periodically modulated in time at scales comparable to the oscillation period of light while remaining spatially uniform.
momentum bandgaps instead of energy bandgaps. The energy is not conserved within momentum bandgaps, and eigenmodes with exponentially growing amplitudes exist in the momentum bandgap. Such properties make photonic time crystals a fascinating novel class of artificial materials from a basic science and applied perspective.
In the most basic one-dimensional (1D) geometry, photonic crystals constitute a multilayer structure with a periodicity comparable to the light wavelength. In its simplest form, each period comprises alternating layers of two distinct materials characterized by permittivities and (see illustration in Fig. 1(a)).
a) Schematics of a conventional 1D photonic (space) crystal where permittivity is modulated along one spatial coordinate while it is constant in time. Moreover, the crystal is uniform along the other two spatial directions. (b) Characteristic band diagram of a 1D photonic crystal. Here, the dispersion relation is shown, expressing the functional dependency of the frequency on the real part of the wavenumber that expresses the phase variation of the eigenmode along the direction of the periodic material modulation. The third coordinate axis denotes the imaginary part of wavenumber .
. (c) Schematics of a photonic time crystal where the permittivity is a periodic function of time only. Otherwise, the spatial distribution of the permittivity is uniform in all three directions. (d) Characteristic band diagram of a photonic time crystal. The third coordinate axis denotes the imaginary part of frequency . Inside the momentum bandgap, two eigenmodes are supported: one exponentially growing (shown in red) and one exponentially decaying (shown in green) in time.
Note that in (b), (c), and (d), the harmonic distribution is asymmetric with respect to the fundamental harmonic. This asymmetry is caused by the asymmetry of the matrix in Eq. (17) since ( is outside the momentum bandgap).
asymmetric band structure of amplitude
The frequencies of all the harmonics share the same imaginary part
The 1st harmonic, i.e., , possesses the same amplitude as the fundamental harmonic, i.e., . Thus, this degenerate pair of dominant harmonics has real frequencies with opposite signs. Since the two harmonics share the same momentum , their phase velocities are opposite . Therefore, this pair of dominant harmonics represents a standing wave [98] whose amplitude grows or decays exponentially over time due to the nature of the complex eigenfrequency. From Eq. (11)
By assuming that the electrons/atoms/meta-atoms interact weakly with each other, the time-dependent complex susceptibility is expressed as a product of a time-varying function, describing the change of density in time and the Lorentzian dispersion.
Further, the central frequency of the pulse is taken as . In the following, the group velocity and pulse energy of the Gaussian pulse are examined for different disorder amplitudes
the infinite group velocity of the solitons does not violate Einstein’s causality principle. This is because, in active media, the information velocity is defined by the velocity of the leading edge of the wave packet. Therefore, the group velocity, which quantifies the motion of the center of the wave packet, does not relate to the velocity at which information travels.
I emailed Professor Guenter Nimtz the above - it's his same secret!
Thus, the energy in the circuit escalates throughout one complete oscillation cycle, resulting in parametric amplification (here, the modulated “parameter” is the capacitance ). The energy growth in the circuit is exponential. One can notice that to have an energy growth without any energy decrease within each cycle of the voltage (i.e., for the time interval ), it is important to modulate the capacitance at twice the frequency, i.e.,
One can follow the same logic and consider the case when the voltage oscillation is shifted by a phase with respect to the voltage signal in the above example. Then, the power in the circuit would decrease twice per cycle (i.e., for ) and never increase, as shown in Fig. 18(d). This regime is called parametric de-amplification [161]
degenerate parametric amplification in nonlinear optics strongly depends on the relative phase difference between the signal and pump photons.
a) Difference-frequency generation process resulting in optical parametric amplification along the spatial coordinate .
requires nearly perfect phase matching since
in time crystals, the particles oscillate periodically in time in a harmonic manner, which breaks continuous time translational symmetry [22]. Time crystals represent a new phase of matter
This force keeps the system out of equilibrium. However, the system’s response to this driving force exhibits a periodicity that is different (usually an integer multiple) from that of the driving force itself. This incoherence of the particle oscillation and the external pump indicates that the oscillation of particles is mainly caused by the interactions of particles themselves rather than directly driven by the external pump. It is a kind of semi-spontaneous oscillation. The most important feature of a discrete time crystal is that it is robust to the interaction strength among particles and the imperfection in the driving pulses [167,168], showing the characteristics of a new phase of matter.
Between the subluminal and superluminal regimes, there is a special scenario that the modulation phase velocity is equal to the speed of light, which is called luminal, i.e., . This is an exceptional case where exotic wave effects can happen [223]. As shown in Fig. 33(a), the reciprocal vector (green arrow) aligns with the dispersion curve of a stationary material. The band structure of a space–time varying media is formed by folding the dispersion curve of the stationary material by reciprocal vectors. The crossing of the bands results in that all the forward-traveling states are degenerate in a broadband region and therefore strongly coupled. Therefore, luminal modulation can induce broadband nonreciprocal amplification [223].
it shifts the photon frequency to satisfy momentum conservation as opposed to the spatial case in which the wavevector changes to preserve energy (appendix A in the Supplementary Information). For time refraction, the condition ω1n1 = ω2n2 holds (where ω1 and ω2 are the angular frequencies before and after the time boundary and n1 and n2 are the indices before and after the time boundary, respectively).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-025-01640-1
Recently, transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) have proven pivotal in the near-infrared region to overcome the previously stated trade-off between amplitude and speed.
These materials also lend themselves towards the realization of photonic time crystals, which can also be theoretically exploited for light amplification23,24,25.
Therefore, the transmitted pulse is spatially split into two halves, each containing about half the overall spectral power. In addition, these two ‘fission products’ show strong spectral shifts, which are opposite in sign for both halves and centred at the near-zero-index carrier wavelength.
Time-varying metamaterials rely on large and fast changes of the linear permittivity. Beyond the linear terms, however, the effect of a non-perturbative modulation of the medium on harmonic generation remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study second harmonic generation at an optically pumped time-varying interface between air and a 310 nm Indium Tin Oxide film. We observe a modulation contrast at the second harmonic wavelength up to 93% for a pump intensity of 100 GW/cm2, leading to large frequency broadening and shift. We experimentally demonstrate that a significant contribution to the enhancement comes from the temporal modulation of the second order nonlinear susceptibility. Moreover, we show the frequency-modulated spectra resulting from single and double-slit time diffraction could be exploited for enhanced optical computing and sensing, enabling broadband time-varying effects on the harmonic signal and extending the application of Epsilon-Near-Zero materials to the visible range.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51588-z
As pointed out in previous studies of a time-varying ITO layer5,28, frequency shift and broadening can be respectively linked to changes in the phase and amplitude of the complex reflection coefficient of the system. Although qualitatively similar to the time-diffraction at the fundamental frequency (see Supplementary Fig. 6 for a detailed comparison), the overall shift of the harmonic spectrum is twice as large, with a much larger suppression of the peak around the unmodulated frequency.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.186902
In this study, we explore wave scattering from a time-varying interface characterized by a Lorentz-type dispersion with a steplike temporal variation in its parameters. Our findings reveal a new process: an unconventional frequency generation at the natural resonances of the system.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apq/article/1/2/020901/3282301
Space–time variation spoils frequency conservation and brings negative frequencies into the picture.
. In particular, we note the central role played by negative frequencies, which are an inevitable consequence of time dependence. In a rotationally symmetric system that conserves spin, direct transitions of photons from positive to negative frequency are forbidden because reversing frequency reverses spin. Access to negative frequencies is facilitated by the creation of photon pairs (“qubits”), comprising both a positive and a negative frequency, thus satisfying spin conservation but by a process that has no classical counterpart and is responsible for the radiation produced by these systems operating on the ground state.
At time t = 0, the system is set in apparent motion: this can be done without the unphysical assumption of infinite power input
Importantly in this system, neither energy nor frequency is conserved, but conservation violation comes in different forms for each. Although a positive frequency mode entering the time dependent region may emerge as a negative frequency one, this does not indicate that the final photon state has a negative energy. As discussed above, in free space, all photons have a positive energy and the quantum of energy will always be given by ℏω. Instead, as we shall see, a change in the sign of the frequency indicates a transformation of a creation operator into an annihilation operator, which, in turn, affects how we count photons. Therefore, although negative frequencies do not here imply negative energies,
The off diagonal elements represent transitions between different wave frequencies,
We shall show that such emission is essentially a quantum process associated with the creation of photon pairs (“qubits”), similar to the process Hawking pointed out in his seminal paper on radiation from black holes17 and as investigated by the analog gravity research community.18,19 T
The interaction of light with superluminally moving matter entails unconventional phenomena, from Fresnel drag to Hawking radiation and to light amplification. While relativity makes these effects inaccessible using objects in motion, synthetic motion - enabled via space-time modulated internal degrees of freedom - is free from these constraints. Here we observe synthetic velocity of a reflectivity modulation travelling on an Indium-Tin-Oxide (ITO) interface
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.10809
The ability to access both
phase and amplitude modulations, in conjunction with the demonstrated high diffraction
efficiency, allows for the creation of complex and asymmetric momentum-frequency
spectra, beyond Friedel’s law27,28 which dictates that the scattering amplitude is
symmetric and is the Fourier transform of the permittivity modulation, ~ (k, ).
Moreover, the simple space-time modulations demonstrated here can be extended, by
using complex pump beams that are structured in both space and time, to realise
programmable and complex spatio-temporal transformations, surpassing what can be
achieved by sequences of purely spatial or purely temporal modulation29.
The construction of apparent motion using discrete, stationary modulations can be
extended to study exotic and super-relativistic kinds of synthetic motions, as illustrated in
Fig.1c. This prospect of space-time control of light greatly improves upon conventional
perturbative nonlinear optical systems, where interactions with low contrast (change in
refractive index << 1) modulations require long propagation distances to accrue
significant signal – a process that introduces deleterious signals and restricts the control
of space and time independently, e.g. as in a 1D fiber.
here we investigate the fundamental question on whether it is possible to have a mirror without any spatial boundary.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13901
We demonstrate a first implementation of this approach by deflecting ultrashort laser pulses using ultrasound waves in ambient air, entirely omitting transmissive solid media. At optical peak powers of 20 GW exceeding previous limits of solid-based acousto-optic modulation by about three orders of magnitude, we reach a deflection efficiency greater than 50% while preserving excellent beam quality. Our approach is not limited to laser pulse deflection via acousto-optic modulation: gas-phase photonic schemes controlled by sonic waves
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.06579
No comments:
Post a Comment