Photonic Nambu-Goldstone bosons
We study numerically the spatial dynamics of light in periodic square lattices in the presence of a Kerr term, emphasizing the peculiarities stemming from the nonlinearity. We find that, under rather general circumstances, the phase pattern of the stable ground state depends on the character of the nonlinearity: the phase is spatially uniform if it is defocusing whereas in the focusing case, it presents a chess board pattern, with a difference of $\pi$ between neighboring sites. We show that the lowest lying perturbative excitations can be described as perturbations of the phase and that finite-sized structures can act as tunable metawaveguides for them. The tuning is made by varying the in…
Outstanding nonlinear optical properties of methylammonium- and Cs-PbX3 (X = Br, I, and Br–I) perovskites: Polycrystalline thin films and nanoparticles
Metal Halide Perovskites (MHPs) have arisen as promising materials to construct cost-effective photovoltaic and light emission devices. The study of nonlinear optical properties of MHPs is necessary to get similar success in nonlinear photonic devices, which is practically absent in the literature. The determination of the third order nonlinear coefficients is typically done by the Z-scan technique, which is limited by the scattering of polycrystalline thin films. In this work, we have studied nonlinear optical properties of polycrystalline CH3NH3PbX3 (MAPbX3) thin films and colloidal CsPbX3 nanoparticles with three different bandgaps (X3 = I3, Br3, and Br1.5I1.5). Their bright generation o…
Transparent Boundary Condition for Oseen-Frank Model. Application for NLC Cells With Patterned Electrodes
In the present work a novel application of Transparent Boundary Conditions (TBC) to nematic liquid crystal cells (NLCC) with planar alignment and a patterned electrode is studied. This device is attracting great interest since it allows soliton steering by optically and externally induced waveguides. We employ the continuum Oseen-Frank theory to find the tilt and twist angle distributions in the cell under the one-constant approximation. The electric field distribution takes into account the whole 2D permittivity tensor for the transverse coordinates. Standard finite difference time domain methods together with an iterative method is applied to find an approximate solution to our coupled pr…
Vortex replication in Bose-Einstein condensates trapped in double-well potentials
In this work we demonstrate, by means of numerical simulations, the possibility of replicating matter-wave vortices in a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a double-well potential. The most remarkable result is the generation of replicas of an initial vortex state located in one side of the double potential, which evolves into two copies, each one located in one of the potential minima. A simple linear theory gives the basic explanation of the phenomenon and predicts experimental realistic conditions for observation. A complementary strategy of easy experimental implementation to dramatically decrease the replication time is presented and numerically tested for the general case of nonlinea…
Characterization of different regimes in nonlinear liquid crystal models
[EN] The range of validity of two models for nonlocal nonlinear optics in Nematic Liquid Crystals (NLC) is studied. Particularly the influence of the optical power and the initial position of the beam over its trajectory is studied when launching the beam with an offset in a planar cell. The main difference between both models is the dependence of the orientational angle with the optical field, either linear or nonlinear. The results demonstrate the critical role of the nonlinearity in the propagation of nematicons in NLC planar cells. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company.
Precision tests of QED and non-standard models by searching photon-photon scattering in vacuum with high power lasers
We study how to search for photon-photon scattering in vacuum at present petawatt laser facilities such as HERCULES, and test Quantum Electrodynamics and non-standard models like Born-Infeld theory or scenarios involving minicharged particles or axion-like bosons. First, we compute the phase shift that is produced when an ultra-intense laser beam crosses a low power beam, in the case of arbitrary polarisations. This result is then used in order to design a complete test of all the parameters appearing in the low energy effective photonic Lagrangian. In fact, we propose a set of experiments that can be performed at HERCULES, eventually allowing either to detect photon-photon scattering as du…