No Arabic abstract
We present a method based on the scattering $mathbb{T}$ operator, and conservation of net real and reactive power, to provide physical bounds on any electromagnetic design objective that can be framed as a net radiative emission, scattering or absorption process. Application of this approach to planewave scattering from an arbitrarily shaped, compact body of homogeneous electric susceptibility $chi$ is found to predictively quantify and differentiate the relative performance of dielectric and metallic materials across all optical length scales. When the size of a device is restricted to be much smaller than the wavelength (a subwavelength cavity, antenna, nanoparticle, etc.), the maximum cross section enhancement that may be achieved via material structuring is found to be much weaker than prior predictions: the response of strong metals ($mathrm{Re}[chi] < 0$) exhibits a diluted (homogenized) effective medium scaling $propto |chi| / mathrm{Im}[chi]$; below a threshold size inversely proportional to the index of refraction (consistent with the half-wavelength resonance condition), the maximum cross section enhancement possible with dielectrics ($mathrm{Re}[chi] > 0$) shows the same material dependence as Rayleigh scattering. In the limit of a bounding volume much larger than the wavelength in all dimensions, achievable scattering interactions asymptote to the geometric area, as predicted by ray optics. For representative metal and dielectric materials, geometries capable of scattering power from an incident plane wave within an order of magnitude (typically a factor of two) of the bound are discovered by inverse design. The basis of the method rests entirely on scattering theory, and can thus likely be applied to acoustics, quantum mechanics, and other wave physics.
We show how the central equality of scattering theory, the definition of the $mathbb{T}$ operator, can be used to generate hierarchies of mean-field constraints that act as natural complements to the standard electromagnetic design problem of optimizing some objective with respect to structural degrees of freedom. Proof-of-concept application to the problem of maximizing radiative Purcell enhancement for a dipolar current source in the vicinity of a structured medium, an effect central to many sensing and quantum technologies, yields performance bounds that are frequently more than an order of magnitude tighter than all current frameworks, highlighting the irreality of these models in the presence of differing domain and field-localization length scales. Closely related to domain decomposition and multi-grid methods, similar constructions are possible in any branch of wave physics, paving the way for systematic evaluations of fundamental limits beyond electromagnetism.
Critical probes of dark matter come from tests of its elastic scattering with nuclei. The results are typically assumed to be model-independent, meaning that the form of the potential need not be specified and that the cross sections on different nuclear targets can be simply related to the cross section on nucleons. For point-like spin-independent scattering, the assumed scaling relation is $sigma_{chi A} propto A^2 mu_A^2 sigma_{chi N}propto A^4 sigma_{chi N}$, where the $A^2$ comes from coherence and the $mu_A^2simeq A^2 m_N^2$ from kinematics for $m_chigg m_A$. Here we calculate where model independence ends, i.e., where the cross section becomes so large that it violates its defining assumptions. We show that the assumed scaling relations generically fail for dark matter-nucleus cross sections $sigma_{chi A} sim 10^{-32}-10^{-27};text{cm}^2$, significantly below the geometric sizes of nuclei, and well within the regime probed by underground detectors. Last, we show on theoretical grounds, and in light of existing limits on light mediators, that point-like dark matter cannot have $sigma_{chi N}gtrsim10^{-25};text{cm}^2$, above which many claimed constraints originate from cosmology and astrophysics. The most viable way to have such large cross sections is composite dark matter, which introduces significant additional model dependence through the choice of form factor. All prior limits on dark matter with cross sections $sigma_{chi N}>10^{-32};text{cm}^2$ with $m_chigtrsim 1;text{GeV}$ must therefore be re-evaluated and reinterpreted.
The ability to design the scattering properties of electromagnetic structures is of fundamental interest in optical science and engineering. While there has been great practical success applying local optimization methods to electromagnetic device design, it is unclear whether the performance of resulting designs is close to that of the best possible design. This question remains unsettled for absorptionless electromagnetic devices since the absence of material loss makes it difficult to provide provable bounds on their scattering properties. We resolve this problem by providing non-trivial lower bounds on performance metrics that are convex functions of the scattered fields. Our bounding procedure relies on accounting for a constraint on the electric fields inside the device, which can be provably constructed for devices with small footprints or low dielectric constrast. We illustrate our bounding procedure by studying limits on the scattering cross-sections of dielectric and metallic particles in the absence of material losses.
A family of rigorous upper bounds on the growth rate of local gyrokinetic instabilities in magnetized plasmas is derived from the evolution equation for the Helmholtz free energy. These bounds hold for both electrostatic and electromagnetic instabilities, regardless of the number of particle species, their collision frequency, and the geometry of the magnetic field. A large number of results that have earlier been derived in special cases and observed in numerical simulations are thus brought into a unifying framework. These bounds apply not only to linear instabilities but also imply an upper limit to the nonlinear growth of the free energy.
We extend the work of Hellerman (arxiv:0902.2790) to derive an upper bound on the conformal dimension $Delta_2$ of the next-to-lowest nontrival primary operator in unitary two-dimensional conformal field theories without chiral primary operators. The bound we find is of the same form as found for $Delta_1$: $Delta_2 leq c_{tot}/12 + O(1)$. We find a similar bound on the conformal dimension $Delta_3$, and present a method for deriving bounds on $Delta_n$ for any $n$, under slightly modified assumptions. For asymptotically large $c_{tot}$ and fixed $n$, we show that $Delta_n leq frac{c_{tot}}{12}+O(1)$. We conclude with a brief discussion of the gravitational implications of these results.