Femtosecond light pulse propagation through metallic nanohole arrays: The role of the dielectric substrate

We study theoretically ultrafast light propagation through a periodic array of holes in a silver film deposited on a dielectric substrate using a three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation. We focus on studying the effects of the coherent coupling between resonant surface plasmon polariton (SPP) excitations at the top and bottom interfaces of the metal film on the transmission dynamics. In a free standing film, the SPP excitations at both interfaces are fully in resonance and pronounced temporal oscillations in the energy flow between the bottom and top interfaces give evidence for coupling between the (±1,0) SPP modes via photon tunneling through the holes. Variation of the dielectric constant of the substrate lifts the energetic degeneracy between the two modes and thus decreases the coupling and suppresses the energy oscillations. New SPP-enhanced transmission peaks appear when higher order modes at the substrate/metal interface are brought into resonance with the (±1,0) air/metal resonance and efficient mode coupling is achieved. Both temporal transmission dynamics and near-field mode profiles are reported and their implications for tailoring the optical properties of these two-dimensional plasmonic crystals are discussed

Demonstration of superluminal effects in an absorptionless, non-reflective system

We present an experimental and theoretical study of a simple, passive system consisting of a birefringent, two-dimensional photonic crystal and a polarizer in series, and show that superluminal dispersive effects can arise even though no incident radiation is absorbed or reflected. We demonstrate that a vector formulation of the Kramers-Kronig dispersion relations facilitates an understanding of these counter-intuitive effects.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted on Physical Review Letter

Structural and Magnetic Characterization of Large Area, Free-Standing Thin Films of Magnetic Ion Intercalated Dichalcogenides Mn0.25TaS2 and Fe0.25TaS2

Free-standing thin films of magnetic ion intercalated transition metal dichalcogenides are produced using ultramicrotoming techniques. Films of thicknesses ranging from 30nm to 250nm were achieved and characterized using transmission electron diffraction and X-ray magnetic circular dichroism. Diffraction measurements visualize the long range crystallographic ordering of the intercalated ions, while the dichroism measurements directly assess the orbital contributions to the total magnetic moment. We thus verify the unquenched orbital moment in Fe0.25TaS2 and measure the fully quenched orbital contribution in Mn0.25TaS2. Such films can be used in a wide variety of ultrafast X-ray and electron techniques that benefit from transmission geometries, and allow measurements of ultrafast structural, electronic, and magnetization dynamics in space and time

Rare frustration of optical supercontinuum generation

Extremely large, rare events arise in various systems, often representing a defining character of their behavior. Another class of extreme occurrences, unexpected failures, may appear less important, but in applications demanding stringent reliability, the rare absence of an intended effect can be significant. Here, we report the observation of rare gaps in supercontinuum pulse trains, events we term rogue voids. These pulses of unusually small spectral bandwidth follow a reverse-heavy-tailed statistical form. Previous analysis has shown that rogue waves, the opposite extremes in supercontinuum generation, arise by stochastic enhancement of nonlinearity. In contrast, rogue voids appear when spectral broadening is suppressed by competition between pre-solitonic features within the modulation-instability band. This suppression effect can also be externally induced with a weak control pulse.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Coulomb-correlated few-electron states in a transmission electron microscope beam

We observe Coulomb-correlated electron pair and triple states generated by femtosecond photoemission from a nanoscale field emitter inside a transmission electron microscope. Event-based electron spectroscopy allows for spatial and spectral characterization of the electrons emitted by each laser pulse. Distinctive energy and momentum correlations of two- and three-electron states are identified, revealing a strong few-body Coulomb interaction at an energy scale of about two electronvolts. State-sorted beam caustics show a discrete increase in virtual source size and longitudinal source shift for few-electron states, associated with transverse momentum correlations. The pronounced spatial and spectral characteristics of these electron number states allow for filtering schemes that control the statistical distribution of the pulse charge. In this way, the fraction of specific few-electron states can be actively suppressed or enhanced, facilitating the preparation of highly non-Poissonian electron beams for microscopy and lithography, including future schemes in correlated two-electron probing

Ultrafast sublattice pseudospin relaxation in graphene probed by polarization-resolved photoluminescence

Electronic pseudospin degrees of freedom in two-dimensional materials exhibit unique carrier-field interactions which allow for advanced control strategies. Here, we investigate ultrafast sublattice pseudospin relaxation in graphene by means of polarization-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy. A comparison with microscopic Boltzmann simulations allows us to determine a lifetime of the optically aligned pseudospin distribution of 12±2fs. This experimental approach extends the toolbox of graphene pseudospintronics, providing additional means to investigate pseudospin dynamics in active devices or under external fields

Toxicity in Multilingual Machine Translation at Scale

Machine Translation systems can produce different types of errors, some of which are characterized as critical or catastrophic due to the specific negative impact that they can have on users. In this paper we focus on one type of critical error: added toxicity. We evaluate and analyze added toxicity when translating a large evaluation dataset (HOLISTICBIAS, over 472k sentences, covering 13 demographic axes) from English into 164 languages. An automatic toxicity evaluation shows that added toxicity across languages varies from 0% to 5%. The output languages with the most added toxicity tend to be low-resource ones, and the demographic axes with the most added toxicity include sexual orientation, gender and sex, and ability. We also perform human evaluation on a subset of 8 translation directions, confirming the prevalence of true added toxicity. We use a measurement of the amount of source contribution to the translation, where a low source contribution implies hallucination, to interpret what causes toxicity. Making use of the input attributions allows us to explain toxicity, because the source contributions significantly correlate with toxicity for 84% of languages studied. Given our findings, our recommendations to reduce added toxicity are to curate training data to avoid mistranslations, mitigate hallucination and check unstable translations

Am J Med Genet A

We report on a girl with delayed mental and motor development, ophthalmological abnormalities, and peripheral neuropathy. Chromosome analysis suggested a deletion within chromosome 8p. Further investigation by array-based comparative genomic hybridization (array-CGH) delineated an 8 Mb interstitial deletion on the short arm of chromosome 8. The breakpoints are located at chromosome bands 8p12 and 8p21.2. Forty-two known genes including gonadotropin-releasing hormone 1 (GNRH1), transcription factor EBF2, exostosin-like 3 (EXTL3), glutathione reductase (GSR), and neuregulin 1 (NRG1), are located within the deleted region on chromosome 8p. A comparison of our patient with the cases described in the literature is presented, and we discuss the genotype-phenotype correlation in our patient. This is the first report of array-CGH analysis of an interstitial deletion at chromosome 8p