3,588 research outputs found
Propagating and evanescent waves in absorbing media
We compare the behavior of propagating and evanescent light waves in
absorbing media with that of electrons in the presence of inelastic scattering.
The imaginary part of the dielectric constant results primarily in an
exponential decay of a propagating wave, but a phase shift for an evanescent
wave. We then describe how the scattering of quantum particles out of a
particular coherent channel can be modeled by introducing an imaginary part to
the potential in analogy with the optical case. The imaginary part of the
potential causes additional scattering which can dominate and actually prevent
absorption of the wave for large enough values of the imaginary part. We also
discuss the problem of maximizing the absorption of a wave and point out that
the existence of a bound state greatly aids absorption. We illustrate this
point by considering the absorption of light at the surface of a metal.Comment: Brief Review, to appear in the American Journal of Physics,
http://www.kzoo.edu/ajp
Semiclassical quantization of multidimensional systems
Low order classical perturbation theory is used to obtain semiclassical eigenvalues for a system of three anharmonically coupled oscillators. The results in the low energy region studied here agree well with the "exact" quantum values. The latter had been calculated by matrix diagonalization using a large basis set
The conditional tunneling time for reflection using the WKB wave-function
We derive an expression for the conditional time for the reflection of a wave
from an arbitrary potential barrier using the WKB wavefunction in the barrier
region. Our result indicates that the conditional times for transmission and
reflection are equal for a symmetric barrier within the validity of the WKB
approach.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 1 eps figure include
Sub-wavelength imaging: Resolution enhancement using metal wire gratings
An experimental evidence of subwavelength imaging with a "lens", which is a
uniaxial negative permittivity wire medium slab, is reported. The slab is
formed by gratings of long thin parallel conducting cylinders. Taking into
account the anisotropy and spatial dispersion in the wire medium we
theoretically show that there are no usual plasmons that could be exited on
surfaces of such a slab, and there is no resonant enhancement of evanescent
fields in the slab. The experimentally observed clear improvement of the
resolution in the presence of the slab is explained as filtering out the
harmonics with small wavenumbers. In other words, the wire gratings (the wire
medium) suppress strong traveling-mode components increasing the role of
evanescent waves in the image formation. This effect can be used in near-field
imaging and detection applications.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure
Diffusion at constant speed in a model phase space
We reconsider the problem of diffusion of particles at constant speed and
present a generalization of the Telegrapher process to higher dimensional
stochastic media (), where the particle can move along directions.
We derive the equations for the probability density function using the
``formulae of differentiation'' of Shapiro and Loginov. The model is an
advancement over similiar models of photon migration in multiply scattering
media in that it results in a true diffusion at constant speed in the limit of
large dimensions.Comment: Final corrected version RevTeX, 6 pages, 1 figur
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