Related papers: Visualizing strongly focused 3D light fields in an…
Strong light-matter coupling gives rise to polaritons - hybrid excitations whose mixed photonic and matter character enables control over optical, electronic and chemical properties. This Feature Article surveys the main architectures…
Laser-induced optical potentials for atoms have led to remarkable advances in precision measurement, quantum information, and towards addressing fundamental questions in condensed matter physics. Here, we describe analogous optical…
Tightly focused optical dipole traps induce vector light shifts ("fictitious magnetic fields") which complicate their use for single-atom trapping and manipulation. The problem can be mitigated by adding a larger, real magnetic field, but…
Hollow-core photonic-crystal waveguides filled with cold atoms can support giant optical nonlinearities through nondispersive propagation of light tightly confined in the transverse direction. Here we explore electromagnetically induced…
Recently, it was shown that a non-zero transverse angular momentum manifests itself in a polarization dependent intensity shift of the barycenter of a paraxial light beam [A. Aiello et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 100401 (2009)]. The…
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…
Structured photons are nowadays an interesting resource in classical and quantum optics due to the richness of properties they show under propagation, focusing and in their interaction with matter. Vectorial modes of light in particular, a…
Structured light beams with space-variant polarization can be efficiently generated using voltage-tunable nematic liquid-crystal (Q-plate). By appropriately selecting the input state and the retardation of the Q-plate, an optical field…
The interaction between a quantum particle's spin angular momentum and its orbital angular momentum is ubiquitous in nature. In optics, the spin-orbit optical phenomenon is closely related with the light-matter interaction and has been of…
We study effective three-particle interactions between valence electrons, which are induced by the core polarization. Such interactions are enhanced when valence orbitals have strong overlap with the outermost core shell, in particular for…
When reflected from an interface, a laser beam generally drifts and tilts away from the path predicted by ray optics, an intriguing consequence of its finite transverse extent. Such beam shifts manifest more dramatically for structured…
We analyze the real-time electron-photon dynamics in long-range polariton-mediated energy transfer using a real-time quantum electrodynamics coupled cluster (RT-QED-CC) model, which allows for spatial and temporal visualization of transport…
Interference between magnetic substates of the hyperfine structure states belonging to different fine structure states of the same term influences the polarization for some of the diagnostically important lines of the Sun's spectrum, like…
We demonstrate that the differential ac-Stark shift of a ground-state hyperfine transition in an optical trap can be eliminated by using properly polarized trapping light. We use the vector polarizability of an alkali-metal atom to produce…
We propose a scheme to create an effective magnetic field for ultra-cold atoms in a planar geometry. The set-up allows the experimental study of classical and quantum Hall effects in close analogy to solid-state systems including the…
Despite the intrinsic coupling between electric and magnetic fields in random stationary light, their polarization properties are not mutually determined. A complete second-order description thus necessitates a joint electromagnetic…
From the analysis of measurements of the linear polarisation of visible light coming from quasars, the existence of large-scale coherent orientations of quasar polarisation vectors in some regions of the sky has been reported. Here, we show…
We theoretically study how the peculiar properties of the vacuum state of an ultra-strongly coupled system can affect basic light-matter interaction processes. In this unconventional electromagnetic environment, an additional emitter no…
We demonstrate a pump-probe scheme in which an atomic vapor is optically pumped with circularly polarized light and probed with a vector vortex beam. The pump induces a macroscopic magnetization in the medium, which gives rise to…
We present a theoretical study of radiative transfer in strongly magnetized electron-ion plasmas, focusing on the effect of vacuum polarization due to quantum electrodynamics. This study is directly relevant to thermal radiation from the…