Related papers: Light, Matter, Action: Shining light on active mat…
Light provides a powerful means of controlling physical behavior of materials but is rarely used to power and guide active matter systems. We demonstrate optical control of liquid crystalline topological solitons dubbed "skyrmions", which…
In this book chapter, we review how systems of simple motile agents can be used as a pathway to intelligent systems. It is a well known result from nature that large groups of entities following simple rules, such as swarms of animals, can…
An important goal of modern condensed matter physics involves the search for states of matter with new emergent properties and desirable functionalities. Although the tools for material design remain relatively limited, notable advances…
The most commonly observed quantity related to light is its power or equivalently its energy. It can be either measured with a bolometer, a photodiode or estimated with the naked eye. Alternatively people can measure the light impulse or…
Free-electron interactions with light and matter have long served as a cornerstone for exploring the quantum and ultrafast dynamics of material excitation. In recent years, this paradigm has evolved from a classical description of radiation…
Soft and active condensed matter represent a class of fascinating materials that we encounter in our everyday lives -- and constitute life itself. Control signals interact with the dynamics of these systems, and this influence is formalized…
Optomechanics, the study of the mechanical interaction of light with matter, has proven to be a fruitful area of research that has yielded many notable achievements, including the direct detection of gravitational waves in kilometer-scale…
One characteristic feature of soft matter systems is their strong response to external stimuli. As a consequence they are comparatively easily driven out of their ground state and out of equilibrium, which leads to many of their fascinating…
As the study of active matter has developed into one of the most rapidly growing subfields of condensed matter physics, more and more kinds of physical systems have been included in this framework. While the word 'active' is often thought…
Laser has become a powerful tool to manipulate micro-particles and atoms by radiation pressure force or photophoretic force, but optical manipulation is less noticeable for large objects. Optically-induced negative forces have been proposed…
Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…
Slow light is a fascinating physical effect, raising fundamental questions related to our understanding of light-matter interactions as well as offering new possibilities for photonic devices. From the first demonstrations of slow light…
In the last 20 years, active matter has been a very successful research field, bridging the fundamental physics of nonequilibrium thermodynamics with applications in robotics, biology, and medicine. This field deals with active particles,…
Soft materials consist of basic units that are significantly larger than an atom but much smaller than the overall dimensions of the sample. The label "soft condensed matter" emphasizes that the large basic building blocks of these…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
Light carries both spin and momentum. Spin-orbit interactions of light come into play at the subwavelength scale of nano-optics and nano-photonics, where they determine the behaviour of light. These phenomena, in which the spin affects and…
The subject of optomechanics involves interactions between optical and mechanical degrees of freedom, and is currently of great interest as an enabler of fundamental investigations in quantum mechanics, as well as a platform for…
Besides being a source of energy, light can also cool gases of atoms down to the lowest temperatures ever measured, where atomic motion almost stops. The research field of cold atoms has emerged as a multidisciplinary one, highly relevant,…
Assuming the features commonly ascribed to dark matter, we discuss our glimpse of the possibility that dark matter as a light transmitting medium played a role that accounts for the discordant inferences about the dynamical behaviour of…
The interaction of light and matter at the single-photon level is of central importance in various fields of physics, including, e.g., condensed matter physics, astronomy, quantum optics, and quantum information. Amplification of such…