Related papers: Light under a matter field microscope
Ordinary baryonic particles (such as protons and neutrons) account for only one-sixth of the total matter in the Universe. The remainder is a mysterious "dark matter" component, which does not interact via electromagnetism and thus neither…
Precision astrometry offers a way to probe new physics. By measuring the angular position of light sources at unprecedented precision, astrometry could probe minuscule fluctuations of underlying spacetime. This work explores the possibility…
I present a simple view of nonlinear optcal phenomena as being determined mostly by the length of interaction time between photons and matter. This may explain why in the last decades the progress in developing better nonlinear materials…
The standard model of particle physics is marvelously successful. However, it is obviously not a complete or final theory. I shall argue here that the structure of the standard model gives some quite concrete, compelling hints regarding…
A dark photon may kinetically mix with the ordinary photon, inducing oscillations with observable imprints on cosmology. Oscillations are resonantly enhanced if the dark photon mass equals the ordinary photon plasma mass, which tracks the…
Light carries energy and momentum. It can therefore alter the motion of objects from atomic to astronomical scales. Being widely available, readily controllable and broadly biocompatible, light is also an ideal tool to propel microscopic…
Classically the interaction between light and matter is given by the Maxwell relations. These are briefly reviewed and will be used as a basis to discuss several techniques that are used in optical spectroscopy. We then discuss the quantum…
Recent observations indicate that the Universe is not transparent but partially opaque due to absorption of light by ambient cosmic dust. This implies that the Friedmann equations valid for the transparent universe must be modified for the…
Dark matter could be made up of dark photons, massive but very light particles whose interactions with matter resemble those of usual photons but suppressed by a small mixing parameter. We analyze the main approaches to dark photon…
Irradiation with light provides a powerful tool to interrogate, control or induce new quantum states of matter out of equilibrium, however a microscopic understanding of light-matter coupling in interacting electron systems remains a…
Miniaturized optical resonators with spatial dimensions of the order of the wavelength of the trapped light offer prospects for a variety of new applications like quantum processing or construction of meta-materials. Light propagation in…
Direct detection experiments for light (sub-GeV) dark matter are making enormous leaps in reaching previously unexplored theory space. The need for accurate characterizations of target responses has led to a growing interplay between…
Improvements both in the photonic confinement and in the emitter design have led to a steady increase in the strength of the light-matter coupling in cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments. This has allowed to access…
We study matter-wave interferometry in the presence of a stochastic background of gravitational waves. It is shown that if the background has a scale-invariant spectrum over a wide bandwidth (which is expected in a class of inflationary…
The correlation between particle and wave descriptions of electron-matter interactions is analyzed by measuring the delocalization of an evanescent field using electron microscopy. Its spatial extension coincides with the energy-dependent,…
Gravitational lensing of gravitational waves provides a powerful probe of the mass density distribution in the universe. Wave optics effects, such as diffraction, make the lensing effect sensitive to the structure around the Fresnel scale,…
Indirect detection is the search for the particle nature of dark matter with astrophysical probes. Manifestly, it exists right at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, and the discovery potential for dark matter can be…
We update a previous investigation of cosmological effects of a non-standard interaction between neutrinos and dark matter. Parameterizing the elastic-scattering cross section between the two species as a function of the temperature of the…
We consider directly the equations by which matter imposes anisotropies on freely propagating background radiation, leading to a new way of using anisotropy measurements to limit the deviations of the Universe from a…
We treat the problem of a Michelson interferometer in the field of a plane gravitational wave in the framework of general relativity. The arms of the interferometer are regarded as the world lines of the light beams, whose motion is…