Related papers: Experimentally separating vacuum fluctuations from…
Ultrafast phenomena on a femtosecond timescale are commonly examined by pump-probe experiments. This implies multiple measurements where the sample under investigation is pumped with a short light pulse and then probed with a second pulse…
Wolf discovered how the spatial coherence characteristics of the source affect the spectrum of the radiation in the far zone. In particular the spatial coherence of the source can result either in red or blue shifts in the measured…
Recent progress in electro-optic sampling has allowed direct access to the fluctuations of the electromagnetic ground state. Here, we present a theoretical formalism that allows for an in-depth characterisation and interpretation of such…
Dispersion forces between neutral material bodies are due to fluctuations of the polarization of the bodies. For bodies in equilibrium these forces are often referred to as Casimir-Lifshitz forces. For bodies in relative motion, in addition…
Zero-point quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic vacuum create the widely known London-van der Waals attractive force between two atoms. Recently, there was a revived interest in the interaction of rotating matter with the quantum…
We analyze the radiative forces between two dielectric nanospheres mediated via the quantum and thermal fluctuations of the electromagnetic field in the presence of an external drive. We generalize the scattering theory description of…
We show that it is possible to estimate the shape of an object by measuring only the fluctuations of a probing field, allowing us to expose the object to a minimal light intensity. This scheme, based on noise measurements through homodyne…
This pedagogical review aims at presenting the fundamental aspects of the theory of inflationary cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. The analogy with the well-known Schwinger effect is discussed in detail and a…
Irradiation of a medium by short intense pulses from x-ray / XUV free electron lasers can result in saturated photoionization of inner electronic shells. As a result an inversion of populations between core levels appears. The resulting…
We study the system of two localized detectors (oscillators) interacting through a massless quantum field in a vacuum state via an Unruh-DeWitt coupling. This system admits an exact solution providing a good model for addressing fundamental…
Quantum fields possess zero-point or vacuum fluctuations which induce mechanical effects, namely generalised Casimir forces, on any scatterer. Symmetries of vacuum therefore raise fundamental questions when confronted with the principle of…
A semiclassical kinetic theory is presented for the fluctuating photon flux emitted by a disordered medium in thermal equilibrium. The kinetic equation is the optical analog of the Boltzmann-Langevin equation for electrons. Vacuum…
The static Casimir effect describes an attractive force between two conducting plates, due to quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic (EM) field in the intervening space. {\it Thermal fluctuations} of correlated fluids (such as critical…
Between mirrors, the density of electromagnetic modes differs from the one in free space. This changes the radiation properties of an atom as well as the light forces acting on an atom. It has profound consequences in the strong-coupling…
Quantum fluctuations impose fundamental limits on measurement and space-time probing. Although using optimised probe fields can allow to push sensitivity in a position measurement beyond the "standard quantum limit", quantum fluctuations of…
Quantum fluctuations can endow spacetime with a foamy structure. In this review article we discuss our various proposals to observationally constrain models of spacetime foam. One way is to examine if the light wave-front from a distant…
We investigate the quantum fluctuations of a single atom in a weakly driven cavity, where the center of mass motion of the atom is quantized in one dimension. We present analytic results for the second order intensity correlation function…
We consider a multilevel hydrogen atom in interaction with the quantum electromagnetic field and separately calculate the contributions of the vacuum fluctuation and radiation reaction to the rate of change of the mean atomic energy of the…
Quantum fluctuations of the vacuum are both a surprising and fundamental phenomenon of nature. Understood as virtual photons flitting in and out of existence, they still have a very real impact, \emph{e.g.}, in the Casimir effects and the…
A particle in a uniformly accelerated motion exhibits Brownian random motions around the classical trajectory due to the coupling to the field vacuum fluctuations. Previous works show that the Brownian random motions satisfy the energy…