Low-velocity-favored transition radiation
Abstract
When a charged particle penetrates through an optical interface, photon emissions emerge - a phenomenon known as transition radiation. Being paramount to fundamental physics, transition radiation has enabled many applications from high-energy particle identification to novel light sources. A rule of thumb in transition radiation is that the radiation intensity generally decreases with the particle velocity v; as a result, low-energy particles are not favored in practice. Here we find that there exist situations where transition radiation from particles with extremely low velocities (e.g. v/c<0.001) exhibits comparable intensity as that from high-energy particles (e.g. v/c=0.999), where c is light speed in free space. The comparable radiation intensity implies an extremely high photon extraction efficiency from low-energy particles, up to eight orders of magnitude larger than that from high-energy particles. This exotic phenomenon of low-velocity-favored transition radiation originates from the excitation of Ferrell-Berreman modes in epsilon-near-zero materials. Our findings may provide a promising route towards the design of integrated light sources based on low-energy electrons and specialized detectors for beyond-standard-model particles.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2212.13066,
title = {Low-velocity-favored transition radiation},
author = {Jialin Chen and Ruoxi Chen and Zheng Gong and Hao Hu and Yi Yang and Xinyan Zhang and Chan Wang and Ido Kaminer and Hongsheng Chen and Baile Zhang and Xiao Lin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.13066},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
13 pages, 4 figures