Related papers: An Archimedes' Screw for Light
It is well known that waves incident upon a crystal are transported only over a limited distance - the Bragg length - before being reflected by Bragg interference. Here, we demonstrate how to send waves much deeper into crystals, by…
Recently, Tang and Cohen (Science 332, 333, 2011) have demonstrated a scheme to enhance the chiral response of molecules, which relies on the use of circularly polarized light in a standing wave configuration. Here we show a new type of…
Astronomical light echoes, the time-dependent light scattered by dust in the vicinity of varying objects, have been recognized for over a century. Initially, their utility was thought to be confined to mapping out the three-dimensional…
An algorithm for simulating self-gravitating cosmological astrophysical fluids is presented. The advantages include a large dynamic range, parallelizability, high resolution per grid element and fast execution speed. The code is based on a…
Exploring the interaction of light with time-varying media is an intellectual challenge that, in addition to fundamental aspects, provides a pathway to multiple promising applications. Time modulation constitutes here a fundamental handle…
Time-varying media have recently emerged as a new paradigm for wave manipulation, thanks to thesynergy between the discovery of novel, highly nonlinear materials, such as epsilon-near-zero materials, and the questfor novel wave…
Experimental methods allow the shape and chemical composition of solid surfaces to be controlled at a mesoscopic level. Exposing such structured substrates to a gas close to coexistence with its liquid can produce quite distinct adsorption…
Light forces induced by scattering and absorption in elastic dielectrics lead to local density modulations and deformations. These perturbations in turn modify light propagation in the medium and generate an intricate nonlinear response. We…
Precise manipulation of small objects using light holds transformative potential across diverse fields. While research in optical trapping and manipulation predominantly relies on the attraction of solid matter to light intensity maxima,…
Liquids under confinement differ in behavior from their bulk counterparts and can acquire properties that are specific to the confined phase and linked to the nature and structure of the host matrix. While confined liquid water is not a new…
This chapter discusses a hydrodynamics-inspired approach to trap and manipulate light in plasmonic nanostructures, which is based on steering optical powerflow around nano-obstacles. New insights into plasmonic nanofocusing mechanisms are…
Photons are nonchiral particles: their handedness can be both left and right. However, when light is transversely confined, it can locally exhibit a transverse spin whose orientation is fixed by the propagation direction of the photons.…
The ability to precisely trap, transport and manipulate micrometer-sized objects, including biological cells, DNA-coated microspheres and microorganisms, is very important in life science studies and biomedical applications. In this study,…
Water is of the utmost importance for life and technology. However, a genuinely predictive ab initio model of water has eluded scientists. We demonstrate that a fully ab initio approach, relying on the strongly constrained and appropriately…
We investigate the scattering of light by a nonlinear, anisotropic slab under conical incidence and arbitrary polarization, within the framework of Maxwell's equations, where the nonlinearities are described by nonlinear susceptibility…
Soft matter consists of meso-scale (nm~{\mu}m) structures that are formed by weak interactions and reorganized under thermal fluctuations. The resulting complex relaxation phenomena may be probed with microrheology, by observing the…
We address the problem of looking into the water from the air, where we seek to remove image distortions caused by refractions at the water surface. Our approach is based on modeling the different water surface structures at various points…
Accretion onto compact objects is one of the most fundamental phenomena in the astrophysics, powering some of the most luminous objects in the sky. Along with this, accretion has also a key impact on the evolution of the Universe, through…
We present a new mapping algorithm, the "Accretion Stream Mapping (ASM)" which uses the full phase-coverage of a light curve to derive spatially resolved intensity distributions along the accretion stream in magnetic cataclysmic variables…
The efficient detection of light from trapped ions in free space is paramount for most of their applications. We propose a scheme to enhance the photon collection from linear ion strings. It employs the constructive interference of light…