A new mechanism of waves-matter interaction
- PDF / 565,365 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 793.701 pts Page_size
- 45 Downloads / 176 Views
vember 2020 Vol. 63 No. 11: 114331 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-020-1580-5
A new mechanism of waves-matter interaction Bin Liang
*
Institute of Acoustics and Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China Received May 8, 2020; accepted May 19, 2020; published online September 7, 2020
Citation:
B. Liang, A new mechanism of waves-matter interaction, Sci. China-Phys. Mech. Astron. 63, 114331 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-0201580-5
In ancient Rome, architects mastered the skills of using vases and walls to control sounds in a theater. In physics, such a principle applies not only to acoustics but also to electromagnetics. Based on the deep understanding of radiation processes, a notion has long been accepted, that is, an emitter interacts with the photonic eigenstates of its surrounding environment, thus laying a pivotal foundation for quantum mechanics development. This notion has also led to the concept of zero-point energy and Purcell effect, where the light-matter interaction can be controlled and manipulated by constructing a desired photonic state. Along with the development of dielectric structures, photonic crystals, plasmonics and metamaterials during the past decades, great progress has been achieved in construction of desired photonic states and control of the light-matter interaction. This triggers various novel applications, including low-threshold lasers, efficient single-photon sources, and quantum information processing. The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for particle control based on the control of the lightmatter interaction at the quantum level. Reporting in Nature Physics, Prof. Ren-Min Ma and colleagues [1] have recently proposed and experimentally demonstrated that the aforementioned notion breaks down at a non-Hermitian degeneracy known as an exceptional point (Figure 1). They found a chirality-reversal phenomenon in a ring cavity, where the radiation field of an embedded emitter became fully decoupled from the cavity eigenstates, but instead, radiated into the missing dimension of the Hilbert *Corresponding author (email: [email protected])
Figure 1 (Color online) The missing dimension at an exceptional point. At an exceptional point, eigenstates become coalesced, and consequently do not span the entire Hilbert space, with one or more dimensions missing. The researchers have demonstrated that the missing dimension can be revealed by a single emitter radiation. This phenomenon challenges the conventional wisdom that an emitter interacts exclusively with the eigenstates of its surrounding environment.
space supplemented by the Jordan vector. In order to explore the new form of the light-matter interaction, Ma, Zhu and Ge [1] focused their attention on the exceptional points in non-Hermitian systems, where eigenstates become coalesced and so do their eigenvalues [2,3]. Consequently, these eigenstates do not span the entire Hilbert space at the exceptional point, with one or more dimensions missing. Next they employed a parity-time-symmetric coaxial micr
Data Loading...
