Related papers: Bright and Dark Helices of Light
Optical beams with a new and distinctive type of helicity have become the subject of much recent interest. While circularly polarised light comprises photons with spin angular momentum, these optically engineered 'twisted beams' (optical…
We propose a laser interference nano-lithography technique for fabrication of nano-structures. This is inspired by a 2pi-illumination system that consists of two cylindrical lens arranged face-to-face at a distance 2f with a common…
We find exact conditions for the enhancement or suppression of internal and/or scattered fields and the determination of their spatial distribution or angular momentum through the combination of simple fields. The incident fields can be…
For the past few decades, structured light has been gaining popularity across various research fields. Its fascinating properties have been exploited for both previously unforeseen and established applications from new perspectives. Crucial…
We investigate the process of circularly polarized high harmonic generation in molecules using a bicircular laser field. In this context, we show that molecules offer a very robust framework for the production of circularly polarized…
When a high-power, femtosecond, circularly polarized (CP) laser pulse is incident on a micrometer-scale aperture in a solid foil target, it drives surface plasma oscillation, generating high-order harmonic vortices in the diffracted light.…
Recently, laser cooling methods have been extended from atoms to molecules. The complex rotational and vibrational energy level structure of molecules makes laser cooling difficult, but these difficulties have been overcome and molecules…
Microscopy and optical imaging are drastically limited by the inhomogeneities encountered by the light while propagating from the object of interest to the detection system. In this context, adaptive optics and wavefront manipulation are…
When a high power laser beam irradiates a small aperture on a solid foil target, the strong laser field drives surface plasma oscillation at the periphery of this aperture, which acts as a "relativistic oscillating window". The diffracted…
Hollow electron beams are today highly desirable for many applications, but are still challenging in view of their detection. In this Letter, we focus on the unique character of the electromagnetic radiation that relativistic hollow…
A simple, robust, and efficient method to produce either radially or azimuthally polarized output beam from a fiber laser is presented. Experimental results reveal that polarization purity of 90% or better can be obtained.
Lightly triggered events may yield surprises about the nature of "soft" particle production at LHC energies. I suggest that event displays in coordinates matched to the dynamics of particle production (rapidity and transverse momentum) may…
The study of light lensed by cosmic matter has yielded much information about astrophysical questions. Observations are explained using geometrical optics following a ray-based description of light. After deflection the lensed light…
We present a novel approach to precisely synthesize arbitrary polarization states of light with a high modulation bandwidth. Our approach consists of superimposing two laser light fields with the same wavelength, but with opposite circular…
Optical lattices are considered loaded by atoms or molecules that can exhibit strong interactions between different lattice sites. The strength of these interactions can be sufficient for generating collective phonon excitations above the…
We propose to use sub-wavelength confinement of light associated with the near field of plasmonic systems to create nanoscale optical lattices for ultracold atoms. Our approach combines the unique coherence properties of isolated atoms with…
Exciting electrons in solids with intense light pulses offers the possibility of generating new states of matter through nonthermal means and controlling their macroscopic properties on femto- to picosecond timescales. One way to manipulate…
Plane-symmetric gravitational waves are considered as gravitational lenses. Numbers of images, frequency shifts, mutual angles, and image distortion parameters are computed exactly in essentially all non-singular plane wave spacetimes. For…
We measure the projected density profile, shape and alignment of the stellar and dark matter mass distribution in 11 strong-lens galaxies. We find that the projected dark matter density profile - under the assumption of a Chabrier stellar…
Macroscopic dark matter (macros) is a broad class of alternative candidates to particle dark matter. These candidates would transfer energy to matter primarily through elastic scattering. A sufficiently large macro passing through the…