Radiation pressure in stratified moving media

Copyright © 2012 American Physical SocietyA general theory of optical forces on moving bodies is here developed in terms of generalized 4×4 transfer and scattering matrices. Results are presented for a planar dielectric of arbitrary refractive index placed in an otherwise empty space and moving parallel and perpendicular to the slab-vacuum interface. In both regimes of motion the resulting force comprises lateral and normal velocity-dependent components, which may depend in a subtle way on the Doppler effect and s-p-polarization mixing. For lateral displacements in particular, polarization mixing, which is here interpreted as an effective magnetoelectric effect due to the reduced symmetry induced by the motion of the slab, gives rise to a velocity-dependent force contribution that is sensitive to the phase difference between the two polarization amplitudes. This term gives rise to a rather peculiar optical response on the moving body, and specific cases are illustrated for incident radiation of arbitrarily directed linear polarization. The additional force due to polarization mixing may cancel to first order in V/c with the first order Doppler contribution yielding an overall vanishing of the velocity-dependent component of the force on the body. The above findings bear some relevance to modern developments of nano-optomechanics and to the problem of the frictional component of the Casimir force

"Electromagnetic induced transparency of Wannier-Mott excitons"

We predict a remarkable quenching of the absorption due to electromagnetic-induced transparency in an undoped bulk semiconductor. For free-exciton lines the effect is expected to be as large as that observed in atomic systems. The conditions for its occurrence are determined and numerical estimates are presented for the specific case of the "yellow" exciton of Cu2O

The regime of electromagnetically induced transparency in optically dense media: from atoms to excitons

The phenomenon of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) was discovered by Adriano Gozzini and coworkers in 1976 in Pisa. Novel schemes to investigate and exploit EIT in the optical domain have attracted much interest both in atomic and solid state systems. We discuss some of our recent theoretical results, in particular: i) a well developed EIT regime based on free exciton levels in undoped bulk crystalline Cu2O; ii) light dragging effects in moving media under EIT; iii) the coherent control of Cherenkov radiation in the EIT regime

Polaritonic stop-band transparency via exciton-biexciton coupling in CuCl

Radiation is almost completely reflected within the exciton-polariton stop band of a semiconductor, as in the typical case of CuCl. We predict, however, that a coherently driven exciton-biexciton transition allows for the propagation of a probe light beam within the stop band. The phenomenon is reminiscent of electromagnetically induced transparency effects occurring in three-level atomic systems, except that it here involves delocalized electronic excitations in a crystalline structure via a frequency and wave-vector selective polaritonic mechanism. A well-developed transparency, favored by the narrow linewidth of the biexciton, is established within the stop band where a probe pulse may propagate with significant delays. The transparency window can be controlled via the pump beam detuning and intensity

Exciton–biexciton quantum coherence and polaritonic stop-band transparency in CuCl.

A coherently driven exciton-biexciton transition in CuCl enables one to propagate a probe light beam within the exciton-polariton stop-band where radiation is otherwise completely reflected. The stop-band transparency window can be controlled via the pump beam frequency and intensity. The phenomenon is reminiscent of quantum coherence effects occurring in three-level atomic systems, except that it here involves delocalized electronic excitations in a crystal via a frequency and wave-vector selective polaritonic mechanism. Both a free standing slab and a microcavity configuration are theoretically studied

All-optical light confinement in dynamic cavities

We show how to realize in a cold atomic sample a dynamic magneto-optically controlled cavity in which a slow-light pulse can be confined and released on demand. The probe optical pulse is retrieved from the atomic spin coherence initially stored within the cavity and is subsequently confined there subject to a slow-light regime with little loss and diffusion for time intervals as long as a few hundred microseconds before being extracted from either side of the cavity. Our proof-of-principle scheme illustrates the underlying physics of this new mechanism for coherent light confinement and manipulation in cold atoms. This may ease the realization of nonlinear interactions between weak light pulses where strong atom-photon interactions are required for quantum information processing

Radiative corrections to the excitonic molecule state in GaAs microcavities

The optical properties of excitonic molecules (XXs) in GaAs-based quantum well microcavities (MCs) are studied, both theoretically and experimentally. We show that the radiative corrections to the XX state, the Lamb shift $\Delta^{\rm MC}_{\rm XX}$ and radiative width $\Gamma^{\rm MC}_{\rm XX}$, are large, about $10-30$ of the molecule binding energy $\epsilon_{\rm XX}$, and definitely cannot be neglected. The optics of excitonic molecules is dominated by the in-plane resonant dissociation of the molecules into outgoing 1$\lambda$-mode and 0$\lambda$-mode cavity polaritons. The later decay channel, ``excitonic molecule $\to$ 0$\lambda$-mode polariton + 0$\lambda$-mode polariton'', deals with the short-wavelength MC polaritons invisible in standard optical experiments, i.e., refers to ``hidden'' optics of microcavities. By using transient four-wave mixing and pump-probe spectroscopies, we infer that the radiative width, associated with excitonic molecules of the binding energy $\epsilon_{\rm XX} \simeq 0.9-1.1$ meV, is $\Gamma^{\rm MC}_{\rm XX} \simeq 0.2-0.3$ meV in the microcavities and $\Gamma^{\rm QW}_{\rm XX} \simeq 0.1$ meV in a reference GaAs single quantum well (QW). We show that for our high-quality quasi-two-dimensional nanostructures the $T_2 = 2 T_1$ limit, relevant to the XX states, holds at temperatures below 10 K, and that the bipolariton model of excitonic molecules explains quantitatively and self-consistently the measured XX radiative widths. We also find and characterize two critical points in the dependence of the radiative corrections against the microcavity detuning, and propose to use the critical points for high-precision measurements of the molecule bindingenergy and microcavity Rabi splitting.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Long-range Angular Correlations On The Near And Away Side In P-pb Collisions At √snn=5.02 Tev

7191/Mar294

Singlets and triplets in hybrid nanodevices

An organic material thin layer can be used to resonantly absorb light and nonradiatively transfer excitation to an adjacent inorganic quantum well the optical nonlinearities of which can in this way be turned on more efficiently than by direct optical pumping. We theoretically consider this process in a hybrid structure based on crystalline tetracene in which the singlet exciton energy is close to twice the one of a triplet exciton and thermally activated singlet exciton fission into two triplets can be efficient. We investigate how the temperature dependence of the singlet exciton diffusion length affects the functional properties of such hybrid organic-inorganic nanostructures based on tetracene. We show how temperature activated fission opens a new possibility to turn on and off the indirect pumping due to energy transfer from the organic into the inorganic subsystem