No Arabic abstract
Photon thermalisation and condensation in dye-filled microcavities is a growing area of scientific interest, at the intersection of photonics, quantum optics and statistical physics. We give here a short introduction to the topic, together with an explanation of some of our more important recent results. A key result across several projects is that we have a model based on a detailed physical description which has been used to accurately describe experimental observations. We present a new open-source package in Python called PyPBEC which implements this model. The aim is to enable the reader to readily simulate and explore the physics of photon condensates themselves, so this article also includes a working example code which can be downloaded from the GitHub repository.
The driven-dissipative nature of light-matter interaction inside a multimode, dye-filled microcavity makes it an ideal system to study nonequilibrium phenomena, such as transport. In this work, we investigate how light is efficiently transported inside such a microcavity, mediated by incoherent absorption and emission processes. In particular, we show that there exist two distinct regimes of transport, viz. conductive and localized, arising from the complex interplay between the thermalizing effect of the dye molecules and the nonequilibrium influence of driving and loss. The propagation of light in the conductive regime occurs when several localized cavity modes undergo dynamical phase transitions to a condensed, or lasing, state. Further, we observe that while such transport is robust for weak disorder in the cavity potential, strong disorder can lead to localization of light even under good thermalizing conditions. Importantly, the exhibited transport and localization of light is a manifestation of the nonequilibrium dynamics rather than any coherent interference in the system.
In the presence of Rashba-Dresselhaus coupling, strong spin-orbit interactions in liquid crystal optical cavities result in a distinctive spin-split entangled dispersion. Spin coherence between such modes give rise to an optical persistent-spin-helix. In this letter, we introduce optical gain in such a system, by dispersing a molecular dye in a liquid-crystal microcavity. We demonstrate both lasing in the Rashba-Dresselhaus regime and the emergence of an optical persistent spin helix.
We present results on the identification of phase transitions in ferrimagnetic GdFeCo alloys using machine learning. The approach for finding phase transitions in the system is based on the `learning by confusion scheme, which allows one to characterize phase transitions using a universal $W$-shape. By applying the `learning by confusion scheme, we obtain 2D $W$-a shaped surface that characterizes a triple phase transition point of the GdFeCo alloy. We demonstrate that our results are in the perfect agreement with the procedure of the numerical minimization of the thermodynamical potential, yet our machine-learning-based scheme has the potential to provide a speedup in the task of the phase transition identification.
Spatial light modulators (SLMs) are central to numerous applications ranging from high-speed displays to adaptive optics, structured illumination microscopy, and holography. After decades of advances, SLM arrays based on liquid crystals can now reach large pixel counts exceeding 10^6 with phase-only modulation with a pixel pitch of less than 10 {mu}m and reflectance around 75%. However, the rather slow modulation speed in such SLMs (below hundreds of Hz) presents limitations for many applications. Here we propose an SLM architecture that can achieve high pixel count with high-resolution phase-only modulation at high speed in excess of GHz. The architecture consists of a tunable two-dimensional array of vertically oriented, one-sided microcavities that are tuned through an electro-optic material such as barium titanate (BTO). We calculate that the optimized microcavity design achieves a {pi} phase shift under an applied bias voltage below 10 V, while maintaining nearly constant reflection amplitude. As two model applications, we consider high-speed 2D beam steering as well as beam forming. The outlined design methodology could also benefit future design of spatial light modulators with other specifications (for example amplitude modulators). This high-speed SLM architecture promises a wide range of new applications ranging from fully tunable metasurfaces to optical computing accelerators, high-speed interconnects, true 2D phased array beam steering, and quantum computing with cold atom arrays.
Strong interaction between light and matter waves, such as electron beams in electron microscopes, has recently emerged as a new tool for understanding entanglement. Here, we systematically investigate electron-light interactions from first principles. We show that enhanced coupling can be achieved for systems involving slow electron wavepackets interacting with plasmonic nanoparticles, due to simultaneous classical recoil and quantum mechanical photon absorption and emission processes. For slow electrons with longitudinal broadenings longer than the dimensions of nanoparticles, phase-matching between slow electrons and plasmonic oscillations is manifested as an additional degree of freedom to control the strength of coupling. Our findings pave the way towards a systematic and realistic understanding of electron-light interactions beyond adiabatic approximations, and lay the ground for realization of entangled electron-photon systems and Boson-sampling devices involving light and matter waves.