Additional electromagnetic waves and additional boundary conditions (ABCs) in non-local materials attracted a lot of attention in the past. Here we report the possibility of additional propagating and evanescent waves in local anisotropic and bi-anisotropic linear materials. We investigate the possible options for ABCs and describe how to complement the conventional 4 Maxwells boundary conditions in the situations when there are more than 4 waves that need to be matched at the boundary of local and linear quartic metamaterials. We show that these ABCs must depend on the properties of the interface and require the introduction of the additional effective material parameters describing this interface, such as surface conductivities.
We study the phenomenon of additional light waves (ALWs), observed in crystal optics: two or more electromagnetic waves with the same polarization, but different refractive index, propagate simultaneously in a isotropic medium. We show that ALWs are common in relativistic hydrodynamics, and in particular in strongly coupled systems that admit a dual gravitational description, where the ALWs are dual to quasi normal modes in the AdS gravity. We study both the transverse and the longitudinal light wave propagation. In the longitudinal channel we find a transition between regimes with different number of excitonic resonances which resembles the transition to standard optics observed in crystals.
Nonlocal (spatial-dispersion) effects in multilayered metamaterials composed of periodic stacks of alternating, deeply subwavelength dielectric layers are known to be negligibly weak. Counterintuitively, under certain critical conditions, weak nonlocality may build up strong boundary effects that are not captured by conventional (local) effective-medium models based on simple mixing formulas. Here, we show that this phenomenon can be fruitfully studied and understood in terms of error propagation in the iterated maps of the trace and anti-trace of the optical transfer matrix of the multilayer. Our approach effectively parameterizes these peculiar effects via remarkably simple and insightful closed-form expressions, which enable direct identification of the critical parameters and regimes. We also show how these boundary effects can be captured by suitable nonlocal corrections.
Unidirectional in-plane structural anisotropy in Rhenium-based transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) introduces a new class of 2-D materials, exhibiting anisotropic optical properties. In this work, we perform temperature dependent, polarization-resolved photoluminescence and reflectance measurements on several-layer ReS$_{2}$. We discover two additional excitonic resonances (X$_{3}$ and X$_{4}$), which can be attributed to splitting of spin degenerate states. Strong in-plane oscillator strength of exciton species X$_{1}$ and X$_{2}$ are accompanied by weaker counterparts X$_{3}$ and X$_{4}$ with similar polarization orientations. The in-plane anisotropic dielectric function has been obtained for ReS$_{2}$ which is essential for engineering light matter coupling for polarization sensitive optoelectronic devices. Furthermore, our temperature dependent study revealed the existence of low-lying momentum-forbidden dark states causing an anomalous PL intensity variation at 30 K, which has been elucidated using a rate equation model involving phonon scattering from these states. Our findings of the additional excitonic features and the momentum-dark states can shed light on the true nature of the electronic band structure of ReS$_{2}$.
In a recent paper, we argued that systematic uncertainties related to the choice of Cepheid color-luminosity calibration may have a large influence on the tension between the Hubble constant as inferred from distances to Type Ia supernovae and the cosmic microwave background as measured with the Planck satellite. Here, we investigate the impact of other sources of uncertainty in the supernova distance ladder, including Cepheid temperature and metallicity variations, supernova magnitudes and GAIA parallax distances. Excluding Milky Way Cepheids based on parallax calibration uncertainties, for the color excess calibration we obtain $H_0 = 70.8pm 2.1$ km/s/Mpc, in $1.6,sigma$ tension with the Planck value.
In the context of the celebrated Kuramoto model of globally-coupled phase oscillators of distributed natural frequencies, which serves as a paradigm to investigate spontaneous collective synchronization in many-body interacting systems, we report on a very rich phase diagram in presence of thermal noise and an additional non-local interaction on a one-dimensional periodic lattice. Remarkably, the phase diagram involves both equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase transitions. In two contrasting limits of the dynamics, we obtain exact analytical results for the phase transitions. These two limits correspond to (i) the absence of thermal noise, when the dynamics reduces to that of a non-linear dynamical system, and (ii) the oscillators having the same natural frequency, when the dynamics becomes that of a statistical system in contact with a heat bath and relaxing to a statistical equilibrium state. In the former case, our exact analysis is based on the use of the so-called Ott-Antonsen ansatz to derive a reduced set of nonlinear partial differential equations for the macroscopic evolution of the system. Our results for the case of statistical equilibrium are on the other hand obtained by extending the well-known transfer matrix approach for nearest-neighbor Ising model to consider non-local interactions. The work offers a case study of exact analysis in many-body interacting systems. The results obtained underline the crucial role of additional non-local interactions in either destroying or enhancing the possibility of observing synchrony in mean-field systems exhibiting spontaneous synchronization.