Resonant optical antennas

We have fabricated nanometer-scate gold dipole antennas designed to be resonant at optical frequencies. On resonance, strong field enhancement in the antenna feed gap leads to white-light supercontinuum generation. The antenna length at resonance is considerably shorter than one-half the wavelength of the incident light. This is in contradiction to classical antenna theory but in qualitative accordance with computer simulations that take into account the finite metallic conductivity at optical frequencies. Because optical. antennas link propagating radiation and confined/enhanced optical fields, they should find applications in optical characterization, manipulation of nanostructures, and optical information processing

All-optical switching and strong coupling using tunable whispering-gallery-mode microresonators

We review our recent work on tunable, ultrahigh quality factor whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonators and highlight their applications in nonlinear optics and in quantum optics experiments. Our resonators combine ultra-high quality factors of up to Q = 3.6 \times 10^8, a small mode volume, and near-lossless fiber coupling, with a simple and customizable mode structure enabling full tunability. We study, theoretically and experimentally, nonlinear all-optical switching via the Kerr effect when the resonator is operated in an add-drop configuration. This allows us to optically route a single-wavelength cw optical signal between two fiber ports with high efficiency. Finally, we report on progress towards strong coupling of single rubidium atoms to an ultra-high Q mode of an actively stabilized bottle microresonator.Comment: 20 pages, 24 figures. Accepted for publication in Applied Physics B. Changes according to referee suggestions: minor corrections to some figures and captions, clarification of some points in the text, added references, added new paragraph with results on atom-resonator interactio

The polarized image of a synchrotron-emitting ring of gas orbiting a black hole

High Energy Astrophysic

Constraints on black-hole charges with the 2017 EHT observations of M87*

InstrumentationHigh Energy Astrophysic

The variability of the black hole image in M87 at the dynamical timescale

The black hole images obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are expected to be variable at the dynamical timescale near their horizons. For the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, this timescale (5–61 days) is comparable to the 6 day extent of the 2017 EHT observations. Closure phases along baseline triangles are robust interferometric observables that are sensitive to the expected structural changes of the images but are free of station-based atmospheric and instrumental errors. We explored the day-to-day variability in closure-phase measurements on all six linearly independent nontrivial baseline triangles that can be formed from the 2017 observations. We showed that three triangles exhibit very low day-to-day variability, with a dispersion of ∼3°–5°. The only triangles that exhibit substantially higher variability (∼90°–180°) are the ones with baselines that cross the visibility amplitude minima on the u–v plane, as expected from theoretical modeling. We used two sets of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the dependence of the predicted variability on various black hole and accretion-flow parameters. We found that changing the magnetic field configuration, electron temperature model, or black hole spin has a marginal effect on the model consistency with the observed level of variability. On the other hand, the most discriminating image characteristic of models is the fractional width of the bright ring of emission. Models that best reproduce the observed small level of variability are characterized by thin ring-like images with structures dominated by gravitational lensing effects and thus least affected by turbulence in the accreting plasmas.https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332e/pdfPublished versio

Event Horizon Telescope observations of the jet launching and collimation in Centaurus A

InstrumentationLarge scale structure and cosmolog

First sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope results. VI. Testing the black hole metric

Galaxie

Resolving the inner parsec of the blazar J1924-2914 with the event horizon telescope

Galaxie

A universal power-law prescription for variability from synthetic images of black hole accretion flows

Instrumentatio