The Faraday Quantum Clock and Non-local Photon Pair Correlations

We study the use of the Faraday effect as a quantum clock for measuring traversal times of evanescent photons through magneto-refractive structures. The Faraday effect acts both as a phase-shifter and as a filter for circular polarizations. Only measurements based on the Faraday phase-shift properties are relevant to the traversal time measurements. The Faraday polarization filtering may cause the loss of non-local (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) two-photon correlations, but this loss can be avoided without sacrificing the clock accuracy. We show that a mechanism of destructive interference between consecutive paths is responsible for superluminal traversal times measured by the clock.Comment: 6 figure

Tensor B mode and stochastic Faraday mixing

This paper investigates the Faraday effect as a different source of B mode polarization. The E mode polarization is Faraday rotated provided a stochastic large-scale magnetic field is present prior to photon decoupling. In the first part of the paper we discuss the case where the tensor modes of the geometry are absent and we argue that the B mode recently detected by the Bicep2 collaboration cannot be explained by a large-scale magnetic field rotating, through the Faraday effect, the well established E mode polarization. In this case, the observed temperature autocorrelations would be excessively distorted by the magnetic field. In the second part of the paper the formation of Faraday rotation is treated as a stationary, random and Markovian process with the aim of generalizing a set of scaling laws originally derived in the absence of the tensor modes of the geometry. We show that the scalar, vector and tensor modes of the brightness perturbations can all be Faraday rotated even if the vector and tensor parts of the effect have been neglected, so far, by focussing the attention on the scalar aspects of the problem. The mixing between the power spectra of the E mode and B mode polarizations involves a unitary transformation depending nonlinearly on the Faraday rotation rate. The present approach is suitable for a general scrutiny of the polarization observables and of their frequency dependence.Comment: 33 pages, 4 figures; updated to match the published versio

The magneto-optical Faraday effect in spin liquid candidates

We propose an experiment to use the magneto-optical Faraday effect to probe the dynamic Hall conductivity of spin liquid candidates. Theory predicts that an external magnetic field will generate an internal gauge field. If the source of conductivity is in spinons with a Fermi surface, a finite Faraday rotation angle is expected. We predict the angle to scale as the square of the frequency rather than display the standard cyclotron resonance pattern. Furthermore, the Faraday effect should be able to distinguish the ground state of the spin liquid, as we predict no rotation for massless Dirac spinons. We give a semiquantitative estimate for the magnitude of the effect and find that it should be experimentally feasible to detect in both $\kappa$-(ET)$_2$Cu$_2$(CN)$_3$ and, if the spinons form a Fermi surface, Herbertsmithite. We also comment on the magneto-optical Kerr effect and show that the imaginary part of the Kerr angle may be measurable.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Resonance enhancement of magnetic Faraday rotation

Magnetic Faraday rotation is widely used in optics. In natural transparent materials, this effect is very weak. One way to enhance it is to incorporate the magnetic material into a periodic layered structure displaying a high-Q resonance. One problem with such magneto-optical resonators is that a significant enhancement of Faraday rotation is inevitably accompanied by strong ellipticity of the transmitted light. More importantly, along with the Faraday rotation, the resonator also enhances linear birefringence and absorption associated with the magnetic material. The latter side effect can put severe limitations on the device performance. From this perspective, we carry out a comparative analysis of optical microcavity and a slow wave resonator. We show that slow wave resonator has a fundamental advantage when it comes to Faraday rotation enhancement in lossy magnetic materials

Ultrafast magnetic vortex core switching driven by topological inverse Faraday effect

We present a theoretical discovery of an unconventional mechanism of inverse Faraday effect (IFE) which acts selectively on topological magnetic structures. The effect, topological inverse Faraday effect (TIFE), is induced by spin Berry's phase of the magnetic structure when a circularly polarized light is applied. Thus a spin-orbit interaction is not necessary unlike in the conventional IFE. We demonstrate by numerical simulation that TIFE realizes ultrafast switching of a magnetic vortex within a switching time of 150 ps without magnetic field.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Untangling cosmic magnetic fields: Faraday tomography at metre wavelengths with LOFAR

14 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in "The Power of Faraday Tomography" special issue of GalaxiesThe technique of Faraday tomography is a key tool for the study ofmagnetised plasmas in the new era of broadband radio-polarisation observations. In particular, observations at metre wavelengths provide significantly better Faraday depth accuracies compared to traditional centimetre-wavelength observations. However, the effect of Faraday depolarisationmakes the polarised signal very challenging to detect at metre wavelengths (MHz frequencies). In this work, Faraday tomography is used to characterise the Faraday rotation properties of polarised sources found in data from the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS). Of the 76 extragalactic polarised sources analysed here, we find that all host a radio-loud AGN (Active Galactic Nucleus). The majority of the sources (~64%) are large FRII radio galaxies with a median projected linear size of 710 kpc and median radio luminosity at 144 MHz of 4 × 10 26 W Hz -1 (with ~13% of all sources having a linear size > 1 Mpc). In several cases, both hotspots are detected in polarisation at an angular resolution of ~20'. One such case allowed a study of intergalactic magnetic fields on scales of 3.4 Mpc. Other detected source types include an FRI radio galaxy and at least eight blazars. Most sources display simple Faraday spectra, but we highlight one blazar that displays a complex Faraday spectrum, with two close peaks in the Faraday dispersion function.Peer reviewe

Spectral dependence of photoinduced spin precession in DyFeO3

Spin precession was nonthermally induced by an ultrashort laser pulse in orthoferrite DyFeO3 with a pump-probe technique. Both circularly and linearly polarized pulses led to spin precessions; these phenomena are interpreted as the inverse Faraday effect and the inverse Cotton-Mouton effect, respectively. For both cases, the same mode of spin precession was excited; the precession frequencies and polarization were the same, but the phases of oscillations were different. We have shown theoretically and experimentally that the analysis of phases can distinguish between these two mechanisms. We have demonstrated experimentally that in the visible region, the inverse Faraday effect was dominant, whereas the inverse Cotton-Mouton effect became relatively prominent in the near-infrared region.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

B polarization of the CMB from Faraday rotation

We study the effect of Faraday rotation due to a homogeneous magnetic field on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Scalar fluctuations give rise only to parity-even E-type polarization of the CMB. However in the presence of a magnetic field, a non-vanishing parity-odd B-type polarization component is produced through Faraday rotation. We derive the exact solution for the E and B modes generated by scalar perturbations including the Faraday rotation effect of a uniform magnetic field, and evaluate their cross-correlations with temperature anisotropies. We compute the angular autocorrelation function of the B-modes in the limit that the Faraday rotation is small. We find that primordial magnetic fields of present strength around $B_0=10^{-9}$G rotate E-modes into B-modes with amplitude comparable to those due to the weak gravitational lensing effect at frequencies around $\nu=30$ GHz. The strength of B-modes produced by Faraday rotation scales as $B_0/\nu^2$. We evaluate also the depolarizing effect of Faraday rotation upon the cross correlation between temperature anisotropy and E-type polarization.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Minor changes to match the published versio

Faraday effect in bi-periodic photonic-magnonic crystals

We present a theoretical investigation of the polarization plane rotation at light transmission - Faraday effect, through one-dimensional multilayered magneto-photonic systems consisting of periodically distributed magnetic and dielectric layers. We calculate Faraday rotation spectra of photonic-magnonic crystals, where cell (or supercell) is composed of magnetic layer and dielectric layer (or section of dielectric photonic crystal). We found that the Faraday rotation of p-polarized incident light is increasing in the transmission band with the number of magnetic supercells. The increase of Faraday rotation is observed also in vicinity of the band-gap modes localized in magnetic layers but the maximal polarization plane rotation angles are reached at minimal transmittivity. We show that presence of linear magneto-electric interaction in the magnetic layers leads to significant increase of the Faraday rotation angles of s-polarized incident light in the vicinity of the fine-structured modes inside the photonic-band-gap.Comment: 7 page