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Dark matter is one of the most intriguing scientific mysteries of our time and offers exciting instructional opportunities for physics education in high schools. The topic is likely to engage and motivate students in the classroom and…
Enhancing the absorption and emission of electromagnetic waves over a broad range of wavelengths is a topic of fundamental and applied interest in photonics and energy research. In the context of light trapping in solar cells, for example,…
We have investigated the transport of light through slabs that both scatter and strongly absorb, a situation that occurs in diverse application fields ranging from biomedical optics, powder technology, to solid-state lighting. In…
Absorption and emission of light is studied theoretically for excited atoms in coherent superposition of states subjected to isolated attosecond pulses in the extreme ultraviolet range. A gauge invariant formulation of transient absorption…
We present the first study of light induced atom desorption (LIAD) of an alkali atom (Rb) in porous alumina. We observe the variation due to LIAD of the rubidium density in a vapor cell as a function of illumination time, intensity and…
The teapot effect refers to the tendency of a poured liquid to cling to the lip of a container and run down the outside. It is a familiar but physically rich example of flow separation. We present a low-cost experiment for introductory…
Although the observation of optical spectra is common practice in physics classes, students are usually limited to a passive, qualitative observation of nice colours. This article discusses a diffraction-based spectrometer that allows…
We propose a method to reconstruct the optical absorption of a highly-scattering medium probed by diffuse light. The method consists of learning the optical detection system and then using this result to reconstruct the absorption. Our…
Absorption of light in superconducting electronics is a major limitation on the quality of circuit architectures that integrate optical components with superconducting components. A 10 nm thick film of a typical superconducting material…
A near-minimal instance of optical cooling is experimentally presented wherein the internal-state entropy of a single atom is reduced more than twofold by illuminating it with broadband, incoherent light. Since the rate of optical pumping…
We show an experimental evidence of the domination of absorption over scattering in absorbance spectra of detonation nanodiamonds. We perform the absorbance measurements on the UV-Vis spectrophotometer equipped with integrating sphere and…
We present a method for the measurement of small optical absorption coefficients. The method exploits the deformation of cavity Airy peaks that occur if the cavity contains an absorbing material with a non-zero thermo-refractive coefficient…
We demonstrate Babinet's principle by the absorption of high intensity light from dense clouds of ultracold atoms. Images of the diffracted light are directly related to the spatial distribution of atoms. The advantages of employing…
Understanding the maximal enhancement of solar absorption in semiconductor materials by light trapping promises the development of affordable solar cells. However, the conventional Lambertian limit is only valid for idealized material…
The Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) effect, discovered in the 1950s and further developed in the 1960s, was originally used to estimate stellar angular diameters through intensity correlations measured by spatially separated detectors. Further…
Light trapping for solar cells can reduce production cost and improve energy conversion efficiency. Understanding some of the basic theoretical constraints on light trapping is therefore of fundamental importance. Here, we develop a general…
We observe near 100 % absorption of light in intense ultrashort laser plasma interaction in a metal coated (Au on glass) sub-lambda grating structure under suitable conditions and the subsequent 'hot' electron generation from the grating…
We experimentally demonstrate electromagnetically induced transparency and light storage with ultracold 87Rb atoms in a Mott insulating state in a three dimensional optical lattice. We have observed light storage times of about 240 ms, to…
Optical techniques are finding widespread use in analytical chemistry for chemical and bio-chemical analysis. During the past decade, there has been an increasing emphasis on miniaturization of chemical analysis systems and naturally this…
Absorption of electromagnetic energy by a material is a phenomenon that underlies many applied problems, including molecular sensing, photocurrent generation and photodetection. Commonly, the incident energy is delivered to the system…