Related papers: Beam deflection and negative drag in a moving nonl…
Large and abrupt variations in the electromagnetic properties of materials lead to dramatic effects: even a single step-like change in the refractive index induces striking phenomena, such as time-refraction and time-reflection. When the…
This work seeks to present an investigation about the trajectories followed by rays of light passing through refractive index gradients that was entirely carried by high school students. Such trajectories are curved, therefore contradicting…
We demonstrate a metamaterial that cannot be described by a single set of refractive-index and impedance values, even for fixed frequency and polarization. The metamaterial structure is a stack of dissimilar waveguides with subwavelength…
We introduce a class of metamaterials with uniformly balanced gain and loss associated with complex permittivity and permeability constants. The refractive index of such a balanced pseudo-passive metamaterial is real. An unbounded uniform…
We address the existence and properties of optical solitons excited in thermal nonlinear media with a transverse refractive index gradient. We show that in such a geometry one can generate controllable switching from surface soliton…
We investigate the effects of the relativistic movement of an optical medium on the conditions of constructive and destructive interference, reflection and transmission pattern, and performance of spectroscopes. First, we consider the case…
Here we re-examine one of the most basic quantities in optics: the refractive index. Considering propagation in a plane, we first develop a general formalism for calculating the direction dependent refractive index in a general…
Recent studies demonstrated the violation of reciprocity in optical processes in low-symmetry magnetic crystals. In these crystals the speed of light can be different for counter-propagating beams. Correspondingly, they can show strong…
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…
We study the problem of constructing an optical surface separating two homogeneous, isotropic media, one of which has a negative refractive index. In doing so, we develop a vector form of Snell's law, which is used to study surfaces…
The propagation of waves in complex media can be harnessed either by taming the incident wave-field impinging on the medium or by forcing waves along desired paths through its careful design. These two alternative strategies have given rise…
We analyzed the influence of static gravitational field on the vacuum and proposed the concept of inhomogeneous vacuum. According to the observational result of the light deflection in solar gravitational field as well as the corresponding…
Experiments on light dragging in a moving medium laid the cornerstones of modern physics more than a century ago, and they still are in the focus of current research. When linearly polarized light is transmitted through a rotating…
The physical origins of negative refractive index are derived from a dilute microscopic model, producing a result that is generalized to the dense condensed phase limit. In particular, scattering from a thin sheet of electric and magnetic…
Structured beams of light can move small objects in surprising ways. Particularly striking examples include observations of polarization-dependent forces acting on optically isotropic objects and tractor beams that can pull objects opposite…
A novel method is proposed to measure the refractive indices (RIs) of the materials of different transparent solid state media. To exploit the advantage of non-contact measurement laser beam interferometry is used as an effective technique…
We report numerical experiments of optical wave propagation in composites of high refractive index dielectric rods at frequencies where their first electric and magnetic Mie resonances are excited. The arrays of these particles have been…
Diffraction gratings disperse light in a rainbow of colors with the opposite order than refractive prisms, a phenomenon known as negative dispersion. While refractive dispersion can be controlled via material refractive index, diffractive…
The article presents a straightforward experiment that directly and illustratively demonstrates double refraction. For this purpose, two liquid crystalline cells were designed, which enable qualitative and quantitative measurements of the…
We compute the refractive indices of a photon propagating in strong magnetic fields on the basis of the analytic representation of the vacuum polarization tensor obtained in our previous paper. When the external magnetic field is strong…