No Arabic abstract
Two-dimensional lattices of chiral nanoholes in a plasmonic film with lattice constants being slightly larger than light wavelength are proposed for effective control of polarization and spatial properties of light beams. Effective polarization conversion and strong circular dichroism in non-zero diffraction orders in these chiral metafilms are demonstrated by electromagnetic simulations. These interesting effects are found to result from interplay between radiation pattern of single chiral nanohole and diffraction pattern of the planar lattice, and can be manipulated by varying wavelength and polarization of incoming light as well as period of metastructure and refractive indexes of substrate and overlayer. Therefore, this work offers a novel paradigm for developing planar chiral metafilm-based optical devices with controllable polarization state, spatial orientation and intensity of outgoing light.
We manipulate a Bose-Einstein condensate using the optical trap created by the diffraction of a laser beam on a fast ferro-electric liquid crystal spatial light modulator. The modulator acts as a phase grating which can generate arbitrary diffraction patterns and be rapidly reconfigured at rates up to 1 kHz to create smooth, time-varying optical potentials. The flexibility of the device is demonstrated with our experimental results for splitting a Bose-Einstein condensate and independently transporting the separate parts of the atomic cloud.
A Fermionic Chern insulator serves as a building block for a plethora of topological phases of matter. Chern insulators have now been realized by imposing magnetic order on topological insulators, in hexagonal arrays of helical waveguides, or by driving graphene or graphene-like optical lattices with circularly polarized light. It is known that light beams, in addition to spin angular momentum (SAM), can also carry orbital angular momentum (OAM). Such OAM beams are now being extensively used for new applications in a variety of fields which include optical communication, quantum information, cosmology, and attophysics. These beams are characterized by a phase singularity at the center. The possibility of impinging these beams to create Fermionic topological phases of matter that can harness the central phase singularity of an optical vortex beam has not yet been explored. Here, we propose how a linearly polarized OAM beam can be used to realize a Fermionic Chern insulator.
We calculate the transfer rate of correlations from polarization entangled photons to the collective spin of a many-electron state in a two-band system. It is shown that when a semiconductor absorbs pairs of photons from a two-mode squeezed vacuum, certain fourth order electron-photon processes correlate the spins of the excited electron pairs of different quasi-momenta. Different distributions of the quantum Stokes vector of the light lead to either enhancement or reduction of the collective spin correlations, depending on the symmetry of the distribution. We find that as the squeezing of the light becomes non-classical, the spin correlations exhibit a crossover from being positive with a $sim N^2$ ($N$ is average photon number) scaling, to being negative with $sim N$ scaling, even when $N$ is not small. Negative spin correlations mean a preponderance of spin singlets in the optically generated state. We discuss the possibility to measure the collective spin correlations in a combined measurement of the Faraday rotation fluctuation spectrum and excitation density in a steady-state configuration.
Solving the challenging problem of the amplification and generation of an electromagnetic field in nanostructures enables to implement many properties of the electromagnetic field at the nanoscale in novel practical applications. A first-principles quantum mechanical consideration of such a problem is sufficiently restricted by the exponentially large number of degrees of freedom, and does not allow the electromagnetic field dynamics to be described if it involves a high number of interacting atoms and modes of the electromagnetic field. Conversely, the classical description of electromagnetic fields is incorrect at the nanoscale due to the high level of quantum fluctuations connected to high dissipation and noise levels. In this paper, we develop the framework with a significantly reduced number of degrees of freedom, which describes the quantum spatial dynamics of electromagnetic fields interacting with atoms. As an example, we consider the interaction between atoms placed in a metallic subwavelength groove, and demonstrate that a spontaneously excited electromagnetic pulse propagates with the group velocity. The developed approach may be exploited to describe non-uniform amplification and propagation of electromagnetic fields in arbitrary dispersive dissipative systems.
Writing, erasing and computing are three fundamental operations required by any working electronic devices. Magnetic skyrmions could be basic bits in promising in emerging topological spintronic devices. In particular, skyrmions in chiral magnets have outstanding properties like compact texture, uniform size and high mobility. However, creating, deleting and driving isolated skyrmions, as prototypes of aforementioned basic operations, have been grand challenge in chiral magnets ever since the discovery of skyrmions, and achieving all these three operations in a single device is highly desirable. Here, by engineering chiral magnet Co$_8$Zn$_{10}$Mn$_2$ into the customized micro-devices for in-situ Lorentz transmission electron microscopy observations, we implement these three operations of skyrmions using nanosecond current pulses with a low a current density about $10^{10}$ A/m$^2$ at room temperature. A notched structure can create or delete magnetic skyrmions depending on the direction and magnitude of current pulses. We further show that the magnetic skyrmions can be deterministically shifted step-by-step by current pulses, allowing the establishment of the universal current-velocity relationship. These experimental results have immediate significance towards the skyrmion-based memory or logic devices.