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Diffraction limits the behaviour of light in optical systems and sets the smallest achievable line width at half the wavelength. With a novel subwavelength plasmonic lens to reduce the diffraction via an asymmetry and to generate and…
We provide a vivid demonstration of the mechanical effect of transverse spin momentum in an optical beam in free space. This component of the Poynting momentum was previously thought to be virtual, and unmeasurable. Here, its effect is…
Scattering of light by matter has been studied extensively in the past. Yet, the most fundamental process, the scattering of a single photon by a single atom, is largely unexplored [1-3]. One prominent prediction of quantum optics is the…
An alternative description of quantum scattering processes rests on inhomogeneous terms amended to the Schroedinger equation. We detail the structure of sources that give rise to multipole scattering waves of definite angular momentum, and…
We consider deflection of polarizable molecules by inhomogeneous optical fields, and analyze the role of molecular orientation and rotation in the scattering process. It is shown that molecular rotation induces spectacular rainbow-like…
Blackbody radiation around hot objects induces ac Stark shifts of the energy levels of nearby atoms and molecules. These shifts are roughly proportional to the fourth power of the temperature and induce a force decaying with the third power…
The physics of photon diffusion for the case of active sources is very different to that of passive sources. Fluctuations created just before the time of last scattering allow anisotropy to be created on scales much smaller than allowed by…
The rotational dynamics of particles subject to external illumination is found to produce light amplification and inelastic scattering at high rotation velocities. Light emission at frequencies shifted with respect to the incident light by…
The radiation force exerted on an object by an acoustic wave is a widely studied phenomenon since the early work of Rayleigh, Langevin and Brillouin and has led in the last decade to tremendous developments for acoustic micromanipulation.…
In addition to self-propulsion by phoretic mechanisms that arises from an asymmetric distribution of reactive species around a catalytic motor, spherical particles with a uniform distribution of catalytic activity may also propel themselves…
Optical mixing experiments show the ability of amplifying a weak optical signal by superposing it with a stronger one. This principle has been demonstrated also for weak signals at the quantum level, down to a single photon. In the present…
Strong optical forces with minimal spontaneous emission are desired for molecular deceleration and atom interferometry applications. We report experimental benchmarking of such a stimulated optical force driven by ultrafast laser pulses. We…
Cooperative spontaneous emission of a single photon from a cloud of N atoms modifies substantially the radiation pressure exerted by a far-detuned laser beam exciting the atoms. On one hand, the force induced by photon absorption depends on…
We compare two different models of transport of light in a disordered system with a spherical Gaussian distribution of scatterers. A coupled dipole model, keeping into account all interference effects, is compared to an incoherent model,…
We consider the emission of a photon by a scalar charged particle in a constant and uniform magnetic field. In contrast to the conventional approach with both photon and outgoing charge being assumed to be detected, we study the case where…
We discovered that when a pair of small particles is optically levitated, the particles execute a dance whose motion resembles the orbits of balls being juggled. This motion lies in a plane perpendicular to the polarization of the incident…
Usually, photons are described by plane waves with a definite 4-momentum. In addition to plane-wave photons, "twisted photons" have recently entered the field of modern laser optics; these are coherent superpositions of plane waves with a…
When photons propagate in vacuum they may fluctuate into matter pairs thus allowing the vacuum to be polarised. This linear effect leads to charge screening and renormalisation. When exposed to an intense background field a nonlinear effect…
Positivity bounds on scattering amplitudes provide a necessary condition for a low-energy effective field theory to have a consistent ultraviolet completion. Their extension to gravity theories has been studied in the past years aiming at…
The recoil optical force and torque acting on an electromagnetic dipole are typically derived by computing the imbalance in radiated linear and angular electromagnetic momentum coming from the source, using Maxwell stress tensor…