Related papers: Slow and fast light enhanced light drag in a movin…
The photon-drag effect, the rectified current in a medium induced by conservation of momentum of absorbed or redirected light, is a unique probe of the detailed mechanisms underlying radiation pressure. We revisit this effect in gold, a…
Photo-plasticity in semiconductors, wherein their mechanical properties such as strength, hardness and ductility are influenced by light exposure, has been reported for several decades. Although such phenomena have drawn significant…
Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is a very fundamental interaction between light and travelling acoustic waves, which is mainly attributed to the electrostriction and photoelastic effects with the interaction strength being orders of…
A laser diffraction experiment was conducted to study light propagation in air. The experiment is easy to reproduce and it is based on simple optical principles. Two optical sensors (segmented photo-diodes) are used for measuring the…
Brillouin scattering has applications ranging from signal processing, sensing and microscopy, to quantum information and fundamental science. Most of these applications rely on the electrostrictive interaction between light and phonons.…
There is no aberration of terrestrial sources, because the lightvector has an inertial component. A new analysis of the Michelson Morley experiment shows: Light propagates anisotropically relative to a moving system, dependent on the…
Light diffusion is usually associated with thick, opaque media. Indeed, multiple scattering is necessary for the onset of the diffusive regime and such condition is generally not met in almost transparent media. Nonetheless, at long enough…
As a typical application of photon momentum transfer, optical levitation systems are known for their ideal isolation from mechanical dissipation and thermal noise. These characters offer extraordinary potential for acceleration precision…
We study how the energy dispersion of bosonic atoms loaded into an optical lattice becomes modified due to periodic circular stirring of the lattice to the second order in the strength of stirring. If the lattice breaks mirror symmetry, the…
We prove a gravitational lensing theorem: the magnification of a source of uniform brightness by a foreground spherical lens is mu =1+pi(2R_E^2-R_L^2)/A, where A is the area of the source and R_E and R_L are the Einstein radius and size of…
We investigate whether or not irradiation by squeezed light can provide an enhancement of the two-photon excitation of a system over irradiation by classical light. Our emphasis is not only on whether or not there is such an enhancement,…
The ability to control the speed and polarisation of light pulses will allow for faster data flow in optical networks of the future. Optical delay and switching have been achieved using slow-light techniques in various media, including…
Solitons are of fundamental importance in photonics due to applications in optical data transmission and also as a tool for investigating novel phenomena ranging from light generation at new frequencies and wave-trapping to rogue waves.…
Dynamic light scattering techniques are routinely used for numerous industrial and research applications, because they can give access to the motion spectrum of micro- and nano-objects, and therefore to particle sizes or visco-elastic…
In conventional Maxwell--Lorentz electrodynamics, the propagation of light is influenced by the metric, not, however, by the possible presence of a torsion T. Still the light can feel torsion if the latter is coupled nonminimally to the…
We discuss the prospects for enhancing absorption and scattering of light from a weakly coupled atom in a high-finesse optical cavity by adding a medium with large, positive group index of refraction. The slow-light effect is known to…
We introduce a new approach for measuring both the effective medium and the transport properties of light propagation in heterogeneous media. Our method utilizes the conceptual equivalence of frequency variation with a change in the…
A general expression is derived for the momentum diffusion constant of a small polarizable particle in blackbody radiation, and is shown to be closely related to the long-wavelength collisional decoherence rate for such a particle in a…
Shift-and-add is an approach employed to mitigate the phenomenon of resolution degradation in images acquired through a turbulent medium. Using this technique, a large number of consecutive short exposures is registered below the coherence…
We study the diffusion of a tracer particle driven out-of-equilibrium by an external force and traveling in a dense environment of arbitrary density. The system evolves on a discrete lattice and its stochastic dynamics is described by a…