Related papers: Poincar\'e sphere representation for spatially var…
The orbital angular momentum and the polarisation of light are physical quantities widely investigated for classical and quantum information processing. In this work we propose to take advantage of strong light-matter coupling,…
We present the first experimental results on the use of a thick aligned Si crystal acting as a quarter wave plate to induce a degree of circular polarisation in a high energy linearly polarised photon beam. The linearly polarised photon…
The Lagrange--Poincar\'{e} equations for a mechanical system which describes the interaction of two scalar particles that move on a special Riemannian manifold, consisting of the product of two manifolds, the total space of a principal…
Light injected into a spherical dielectric body may be confined very efficiently via the mechanism of total internal reflection. The frequencies that are most confined are called resonances. If the shape of the body deviates from the…
We present an in-situ method to measure the birefringence of a single vacuum window by means of microwave spectroscopy on an ensemble of cold atoms. Stress-induced birefringence can cause an ellipticity in the polarization of an initially…
A long-standing prediction of quantum electrodynamics, yet to be experimentally observed, is the interaction between real photons in vacuum. As a consequence of this interaction, the vacuum is expected to become birefringent and dichroic if…
A shearing interferometer is presented which uses polarization control to shear the wavefront and to modulate the interference pattern. The shear is generated by spatial walk-off in a birefringent crystal. By adjusting the orientation of…
The properties of the phi^4 scalar field theory on a fuzzy sphere are studied numerically. The fuzzy sphere is a discretization of the sphere through matrices in which the symmetries of the space are preserved. This model presents three…
Diffraction of matter-waves is an important demonstration of the fact that objects in nature possess a mixture of particle-like and wave-like properties. Unlike in the case of light diffraction, matter-waves are subject to a vacuum-mediated…
The geometric phase in optics (GPIO) is directly associated with the polarization of light. We investigate the physical principles underlying the occurrence of the GPIO for a single-mode light beam propagating in a single-mode optical fiber…
Phase is a fundamental resource for optical imaging but cannot be directly observed with intensity measurements. The existing methods to quantify a phase distribution rely on complex devices and structures. Here we experimentally…
We explain in some detail the geometric structure of spheres in any dimension. Our approach may be helpful for other homogeneous spaces (with other signatures) such as the de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spaces. We apply the procedure to the…
Einstein Telescope (ET) is expected to achieve sensitivity improvements exceeding an order of magnitude compared to current gravitational-wave detectors. The rigorous characterization in optical birefringence of materials and coatings has…
We propose an operational degree of polarization in terms of the variance of the projected Stokes vector minimized over all the directions of the Poincar\'e sphere. We examine the properties of this degree and show that some problems…
Cosmological birefringence is a rotation of the polarization plane of photons coming from sources of astrophysical and cosmological origin. The rotation can also depend on the energy of the photons and not only on the distance of the source…
The Schr\"{o}dinger equation has the property that when changing the length scale by $\vec{r} \to \epsilon \vec{r}$ and the energy scale by $E \to E / \epsilon^2$, the shape of the wavefunction remains unchanged. The same re-scaling leaves…
Increasing the complexity of a light field through the advanced manipulation of its degrees of freedom (DoF) provides new opportunities for fundamental studies and technologies. Correlating polarization with the light's spatial or spectral…
Features of complex vector light become important in any interference effects, including scattering, diffraction, and non-linear processes. Here we are investigating the role of polarization-structured light in atomic state interferometers.…
Injecting spin-polarized carriers into semiconductor lasers provides important opportunities to extend what is known about spintronic devices, as well as to overcome many limitations of conventional (spin-unpolarized) lasers. By developing…
We reveal how to exploit joint spatial-electromagnetic duality symmetries to obtain invariant scattering properties (including extinction, scattering, absorption) of self-dual scattering systems for incident waves of arbitrary…