Search results for " Optics"
showing 10 items of 5880 documents
Infrared plasmons propagate through a hyperbolic nodal metal
2022
Metals are canonical plasmonic media at infrared and optical wavelengths, allowing one to guide and manipulate light at the nanoscale. A special form of optical waveguiding is afforded by highly anisotropic crystals revealing the opposite signs of the dielectric functions along orthogonal directions. These media are classified as hyperbolic and include crystalline insulators, semiconductors, and artificial metamaterials. Layered anisotropic metals are also anticipated to support hyperbolic waveguiding. However, this behavior remains elusive, primarily because interband losses arrest the propagation of infrared modes. Here, we report on the observation of propagating hyperbolic waves in a pr…
Probing phonon dynamics with multidimensional high harmonic carrier-envelope-phase spectroscopy
2022
We explore pump-probe high harmonic generation (HHG) from monolayer hexagonal-Boron-Nitride, where a terahertz pump excites coherent optical phonons that are subsequently probed by an intense infrared pulse that drives HHG. We find, through state-of-the-art ab-initio calculations, that the structure of the emission spectrum is attenuated by the presence of coherent phonons, and is no longer comprised of discrete harmonic orders, but rather of a continuous emission in the plateau region. The HHG yield strongly oscillates as a function of the pump-probe delay, corresponding to ultrafast changes in the lattice such as bond compression or stretching. We further show that in the regime where the…
Nuclear quadrupole resonance spectroscopy with a femtotesla diamond magnetometer
2023
Sensitive Radio-Frequency (RF) magnetometers that can detect oscillating magnetic fields at the femtotesla level are needed for demanding applications such as Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR) spectroscopy. RF magnetometers based on Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamond have been predicted to offer femtotesla sensitivity, but published experiments have largely been limited to the picotesla level. Here, we demonstrate a femtotesla RF magnetometer based on an NV-doped diamond membrane inserted between two ferrite flux concentrators. The device operates in bias magnetic fields of 2-10 microtesla and provides a ~300-fold amplitude enhancement within the diamond for RF magnetic fields in the…
Alloy-like behaviour of the thermal conductivity of non-symmetric superlattices
2017
In this work, we show a phenomenological alloy-like fit of the thermal conductivity of (A)d1:(B)d2 superlattices with d1 /= d2, i.e. non-symmetric structure. The presented method is a generalization of the Norbury rule of the summation of thermal resistivities in alloy compounds. Namely, we show that this approach can be also extended to describe the thermal properties of crystalline and ordered-system composed by two or more elements, and, has a potentially much wider application range. Using this approximation we estimate that the interface thermal resistance depends on the period and the ratio of materials that form the superlattice structure
Time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy of strong-field light-dressed solids: prevalence of the adiabatic band picture
2022
In recent years, strong-field physics in condensed-matter was pioneered as a novel approach for controlling material properties through laser-dressing, as well as for ultrafast spectroscopy via nonlinear light-matter interactions (e.g. harmonic generation). A potential controversy arising from these advancements is that it is sometimes vague which band-picture should be used to interpret strong-field experiments: the field-free bands, the adiabatic (instantaneous) field-dressed bands, Floquet bands, or some other intermediate picture. We here try to resolve this issue by performing 'theoretical experiments' of time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (Tr-ARPES) for a strong-field…
Quantitative infrared near-field imaging of suspended topological insulator nanostructures
2021
The development of nanoscale solid-state devices exploiting the promising topological surface states of topological insulator materials requires careful device engineering and improved materials quality. For instance, the introduction of a substrate, device contact or the formation of oxide layers can cause unintentional doping of the material, spoiling the sought-after properties. In support of this, nanoscale imaging tools can provide useful materials information without the need for complex device fabrication. Here we study Bi$_2$Se$_3$ nanoribbons suspended across multiple material stacks of SiO$_2$ and Au using infrared scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy. We validate our…
Emission of coherent THz magnons in an antiferromagnetic insulator triggered by ultrafast spin-phonon interactions
2022
Antiferromagnetic materials have been proposed as new types of narrowband THz spintronic devices owing to their ultrafast spin dynamics. Manipulating coherently their spin dynamics, however, remains a key challenge that is envisioned to be accomplished by spin-orbit torques or direct optical excitations. Here, we demonstrate the combined generation of broadband THz (incoherent) magnons and narrowband (coherent) magnons at 1 THz in low damping thin films of NiO/Pt. We evidence, experimentally and through modelling, two excitation processes of magnetization dynamics in NiO, an off-resonant instantaneous optical spin torque and a strain-wave-induced THz torque induced by ultrafast Pt excitatio…
Maxwell's equations approach to soliton excitations of surface plasmonic resonances
2012
We demonstrate that soliton-plasmon bound states appear naturally as propagating eigenmodes of nonlinear Maxwell's equations for a metal/dielectric/Kerr interface. By means of a variational method, we give an explicit and simplified expression for the full-vector nonlinear operator of the system. Soliplasmon states (propagating surface soliton-plasmon modes) can be then analytically calculated as eigenmodes of this non-selfadjoint operator. The theoretical treatment of the system predicts the key features of the stationary solutions and gives physical insight to understand the inherent stability and dynamics observed by means of finite element numerical modeling of the time independent nonl…
Non-Markovianity-assisted optimal continuous variable quantum teleportation
2018
We study the continuous-variable (CV) quantum teleportation protocol in the case that one of the two modes of the shared entangled resource is sent to the receiver through a Gaussian Quantum Brownian Motion noisy channel. We show that if the channel is engineered in a non-Markovian regime, the information backflow from the environment induces an extra dependance of the phase of the two-mode squeezing of the shared Gaussian entangled resource on the transit time along the channel of the shared mode sent to the receiver. Optimizing over the non-Markovianity dependent phase of the squeezing yields a significant enhancement of the teleportation fidelity. For short enough channel transit times, …
Molecular quantum interface for storing and manipulating ultrashort optical vortex
2022
Light beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have become over the past few years a subject of widespread interest with unprecedented applications in various fields such as optical communication, super-resolution imaging, optical tweezers, or quantum processing. We demonstrate in the present work that gas-phase molecules can be used as a quantum interface to store an OAM carried by an ultrashort laser pulse. The interplay between spin angular momentum and OAM is exploited to encode the spatial phase information of light beams into rotational coherences of molecules. The embedded spatial structure is restored on-demand with a reading beam by taking advantage of field-free molecular ali…