No Arabic abstract
We introduce a new theoretical approach for analyzing pump and probe experiments in non-linear acousto-optic systems. In our approach, the effect of coherently pumped polaritons is modeled as providing time-periodic modulation of the system parameters. Within this framework, propagation of the probe pulse is described by the Floquet version of Maxwells equations and leads to such phenomena as frequency mixing and resonant parametric production of polariton pairs. We analyze light reflection from a slab of insulating material with a strongly excited phonon-polariton mode and obtain analytic expressions for the frequency-dependent reflection coefficient for the probe pulse. Our results are in agreement with recent experiments by Cartella et al. which demonstrated light amplification in resonantly excited SiC insulator. We show that, beyond a critical pumping strength, such systems should exhibit Floquet parametric instability, which corresponds to resonant scattering of the pump polaritons into pairs of finite momentum polaritons. We find that the parametric instability should be achievable in SiC using current experimental techniques and discuss its signatures, including the non-analytic frequency dependence of the reflection coefficient and the probe pulse afterglow. We discuss possible applications of the parametric instability phenomenon and suggest that similar types of instabilities can be present in other photoexcited non-linear systems.
Optimizing the shape of nanostructures and nano antennas for specific optical properties has evolved to be a very fruitful activity. With modern fabrication tools a large variety of possibilities is available for shaping both nanoparticles and nanocavities; in particular nanocavities in thin metal films have emerged as attractive candidates for new metamaterials and strong linear and nonlinear optical systems. Here we rationally design metallic nanocavities to boost their Four Wave Mixing response by resonating the optical plasmonic resonances with the incoming and generated beams. The linear and nonlinear optical responses as well as the propagation of the electric fields inside the cavities are derived from the solution of Maxwell equations by using the 3D finite-differences time domain method. The observed conversion-efficiency of near infra-red to visible light equals or surpasses that of BBO of equivalent thickness. Implications to further optimization for efficient and broadband ultrathin nonlinear optical materials are discussed.
This work reports the experimental observation of a new type of four-wave mixing in which frequency-degenerate weak signal and idler waves are generated by mixing two pump waves of different frequencies in a normally dispersive birefringent optical fiber. This parametric frequency fusion is what we believed the first experimental evidence of inverse four-wave mixing.
The ability to amplify light within silicon waveguides is central to the development of high-performance silicon photonic device technologies. To this end, the large optical nonlinearities made possible through stimulated Brillouin scattering offer a promising avenue for power-efficient all-silicon amplifiers, with recent demonstrations producing several dB of net amplification. However, scaling the degree of amplification to technologically compelling levels (>10 dB), necessary for everything from filtering to small signal detection, remains an important goal. Here, we significantly enhance the Brillouin amplification process by harnessing an inter-modal Brillouin interaction within a multi-spatial-mode silicon racetrack resonator. Using this approach, we demonstrate more than 20 dB of net Brillouin amplification in silicon, advancing state-of-the-art performance by a factor of 30. This degree of amplification is achieved with modest (~15 mW) continuous-wave pump powers and produces low out-of-band noise. Moreover, we show that this same system behaves as a unidirectional amplifier, providing more than 28 dB of optical nonreciprocity without insertion loss in an all-silicon platform. Building on these results, this device concept opens the door to new types of all-silicon injection-locked Brillouin lasers, high-performance photonic filters, and waveguide-compatible distributed optomechanical phenomena.
We study the time evolution of ultra-cold atoms in an accelerated optical lattice. For a Bose- Einstein condensate with a narrow quasi-momentum distribution in a shallow optical lattice the decay of the survival probability in the ground band has a step-like structure. In this regime we establish a connection between the wave function renormalization parameter Z introduced in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2699 (2001)] to characterize non-exponential decay and the phenomenon of resonantly enhanced tunneling, where the decay rate is peaked for particular values of the lattice depth and the accelerating force.
We study the linear response of a coherently driven polariton fluid in the pump-only configuration scattering against a point-like defect and evaluate analytically the drag force exerted by the fluid on the defect. When the system is excited near the bottom of the lower polariton dispersion, the sign of the interaction-renormalised pump detuning classifies the collective excitation spectra in three different categories [C. Ciuti and I. Carusotto, physica status solidi (b) 242, 2224 (2005)]: linear for zero, diffusive-like for positive, and gapped for negative detuning. We show that both cases of zero and positive detuning share a qualitatively similar crossover of the drag force from the subsonic to the supersonic regime as a function of the fluid velocity, with a critical velocity given by the speed of sound found for the linear regime. In contrast, for gapped spectra, we find that the critical velocity exceeds the speed of sound. In all cases, the residual drag force in the subcritical regime depends on the polariton lifetime only. Also, well below the critical velocity, the drag force varies linearly with the polariton lifetime, in agreement with previous work [E. Cancellieri et al., Phys. Rev. B 82, 224512 (2010)], where the drag was determined numerically for a finite-size defect.