Related papers: Optical supercavitation in soft-matter
Continuous films of metals like gold and silver with a thickness of a few tens of nm have poor optical transmission in the visible and infrared. However, the same films become largely transparent when the transmission is mediated by coupled…
Reabsorption, the multiple scattering of spontaneously emitted photons in optically thick gases, is a major limitation to efficient optical pumping and laser cooling in ultracold gases. We report mitigation of reabsorption using spatial and…
Dissipation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in dynamical systems encountered in nature because no finite system is fully isolated from its environment. In optical systems, a key challenge facing any technological application has traditionally…
Electromagnetically induced transparency in an optically thick, cold medium creates a unique system where pulse-propagation velocities may be orders of magnitude less than $c$ and optical nonlinearities become exceedingly large. As a…
Experiments of periodically sheared colloidal suspensions or soft amorphous solids display a transition from reversible to irreversible particle motion that, when analysed stroboscopically in time, is interpreted as an absorbing phase…
Superfluidity is an emergent quantum phenomenon which arises due to strong interactions between elementary excitations in liquid helium. These excitations have been probed with great success using techniques such as neutron and light…
With ready access to massive computer clusters we may now study light propagation in a dense cold atomic gas by means of basically exact numerical simulations. We report on a direct comparison between traditional optics, that is,…
Optical imaging relies on the ability to illuminate an object, collect and analyze the light it scatters or transmits. Propagation through complex media such as biological tissues was so far believed to degrade the attainable depth as well…
We present a concrete picture of spoof surface plasmons (SSPs) combined with cavity resonance to clarify the basic mechanism underlying extraordinary light transmission through metal films with subwavelength slits or holes. This picture may…
Cooperative effects allow for fascinating characteristics in light-matter interacting systems. Here, we study naturally occurring superradiant coupling in a class of quasi-two-dimensional, layered semiconductor systems. We perform optical…
Reflection, refraction, and absorption of light by material media are, in general, accompanied by a transfer of optical energy and momentum to the media. Consequently, the eigen-modes of mechanical vibration (phonons) created in the process…
The formation and dynamics of cavities in liquids leads to focusing of kinetic energy and emission of longitudinal stress waves during the cavity collapse. Here we report that cavitation in elastic solids may additionally emit shear waves…
We study numerically the propagation of two-color light pulses through a metamaterial doped with active atoms such that the carrier frequencies of the pulses are in resonance with two atomic transitions in the $\Lambda$ configuration and…
The transfer-matrix method is a standard approach to wave propagation in stratified media. With the advent of cold-atom-based quantum and photonic technologies, several experiments and many proposals consider light propagation in…
Recent experiments have revealed ultrastrong coupling between light and matter as a promising avenue for modifying material properties, such as electrical transport, chemical reaction rates, and even superconductivity. Here, we explore…
We show that light scattering from an ultracold gas reveals not only density correlations, but also matter-field interference at its shortest possible distance in an optical lattice, which defines key properties such as tunneling and…
A novel approach to study transmission through waveguides in terms of optical streamlines is presented. This theoretical framework combines the computational performance of beam propagation methods with the possibility to monitor the…
We consider a coherent state of light propagating through an ensemble of two-level atoms where all the atoms are initially in their ground state. In ordinary absorption, the transition of atoms to their excited state along with the…
Simultaneous measurements of the intensity and phase of a probe wave reflected from an interface between silica and elemental alpha-gallium reveal its very strong optical nonlinearity, affecting both these parameters of the reflected wave.…
We consider a mixture consisting of two species of spherical nanoparticles dispersed in a liquid medium. We show that with an appropriate choice of refractive indices and particle diameters, it is possible to observe the phenomenon of…