No Arabic abstract
Material strain has recently received growing attention as a complementary resource to control the energy levels of quantum emitters embedded inside a solid-state environment. Some rare-earth ion dopants provide an optical transition which simultaneously has a narrow linewidth and is highly sensitive to strain. In such systems, the technique of spectral hole burning, in which a transparent window is burnt within the large inhomogeneous profile, allows to benefit from the narrow features, which are also sensitive to strain, while working with large ensembles of ions. However, working with ensembles may give rise to inhomogeneous responses among different ions. We investigate experimentally how the shape of a narrow spectral hole is modified due to external mechanical strain, in particular, the hole broadening as a function of the geometry of the crystal sites and the crystalline axis along which the stress is applied. Studying these effects are essential in order to optimize the existing applications of rare-earth doped crystals in fields which already profit from the more well-established coherence properties of these dopants such as frequency metrology and quantum information processing, or even suggest novel applications of these materials, for example as robust devices for force-sensing or highly sensitive accelerometers.
Rare-earth doped crystals have numerous applications ranging from frequency metrology to quantum information processing. To fully benefit from their exceptional coherence properties, the effect of mechanical strain on the energy levels of the dopants - whether it is a resource or perturbation - needs to be considered. We demonstrate that by applying uniaxial stress to a rare-earth doped crystal containing a spectral hole, we can shift the hole by a controlled amount that is larger than the width of the hole. We deduce the sensitivity of $rm Eu^{3+}$ ions in an $rm Y_2SiO_5$ matrix as a function of crystal site and the crystalline axis along which the stress is applied.
Motivated by the nonlinear Hall effect observed in topological semimetals, we studied the photocurrent by the quantum kinetic equation. We recovered the shift current and injection current discovered by Sipe et al., and the nonlinear Hall current induced by Berry curvature dipole (BCD) proposed by Inti Sodemann and Liang Fu. Especially, we further proposed that 3-form tensor can also induce photocurrent, in addition to the Berry curvature and BCD. This work will supplement the existing mechanisms for photocurrent. In contrast to the shift current induced by shift vector, all photocurrents induced by gradient/curl of Berry curvature, and high rank tensor require circularly polarized light and topologically non-trivial band structure, viz. non-vanishing Berry curvature.
The Casimir effect in an inhomogeneous dielectric is investigated using Lifshitzs theory of electromagnetic vacuum energy. A permittivity function that depends continuously on one Cartesian coordinate is chosen, bounded on each side by homogeneous dielectrics. The result for the Casimir stress is infinite everywhere inside the inhomogeneous region, a divergence that does not occur for piece-wise homogeneous dielectrics with planar boundaries. A Casimir force per unit volume can be extracted from the infinite stress but it diverges on the boundaries between the inhomogeneous medium and the homogeneous dielectrics. An alternative regularization of the vacuum stress is considered that removes the contribution of the inhomogeneity over small distances, where macroscopic electromagnetism is invalid. The alternative regularization yields a finite Casimir stress inside the inhomogeneous region, but the stress and force per unit volume diverge on the boundaries with the homogeneous dielectrics. The case of inhomogeneous dielectrics with planar boundaries thus falls outside the current understanding of the Casimir effect.
We investigate the optical properties of hydrogen as it undergoes a transition from the insulating molecular to the metallic atomic phase, when heated by a pulsed laser at megabar pressures in a diamond anvil cell. Most current experiments attempt to observe this transition by detecting a change in the optical reflectance and/or transmittance. Theoretical models for this change are based on the dielectric function calculated for bulk, homogeneous slabs of material. Experimentally, one expects a hydrogen plasma density that varies on a length scale not substantially smaller than the wave length of the probing light. We show that taking this inhomogeneity into account can lead to significant corrections in the reflectance and transmittance. We present a technique to calculate the optical properties of systems with a smoothly varying density of charge carriers, determine the optical response for metallic hydrogen in the diamond anvil cell experiment and contrast this with the standard results. Analyzing recent experimental results we obtain $sigma^{Drude}_{DC}=(2.1 pm 1.3) times 10^3$ ($Omega$ cm)$^{-1}$ for the conductivity of metallic hydrogen at 170 GPa and 1250 K.
Pentadiamond is a recently proposed new carbon allotrope consisting of a network of pentagonal rings where both sp$^2$ and sp$^3$ hybridization are present. In this work we investigated the mechanical and electronic properties, as well as, the thermal stability of pentadiamond using DFT and fully atomistic reactive molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We also investigated its properties beyond the elastic regime for three different deformation modes: compression, tensile and shear. The behavior of pentadiamond under compressive deformation showed strong fluctuations in the atomic positions which are responsible for the strain softening at strains beyond the linear regime, which characterizes the plastic flow. As we increase temperature, as expected, Youngs modulus values decrease, but this variation (up to 300 K) is smaller than 10% (from 347.5 to 313.6 GPa), but the fracture strain is very sensitive, varying from $sim$44% at 1K to $sim$5% at 300K.