Physicists from Purdue University have discovered new waves with spatial variations in electromagnetic
Interaction of light and matter in materialsplays a central role in several photonic devices, from lasers to detectors. Over the past decade, nanophotonics, the study of how light flows at the nanometer scale in engineered structures such as photonic crystals and metamaterials, has led to important advances.
A long-standing mystery in this area has been the missinglink between atomic lattices, their symmetries and the role it plays in picoscopic light fields, the authors of the study say. To deal with this issue, theoretical physicists developed Maxwell's Hamiltonian structure of matter and applied to it the quantum theory of light-induced response in materials.
Scientists have proven that among traditionalknown electromagnetic waves in the atomic lattice, new anomalous waves should arise. These light waves fluctuate wildly even within the same fundamental building block of a silicon crystal.
Natural materials themselves have a richthe internal symmetry of the crystal lattice, and light depends strongly on this symmetry. Our immediate goal is to apply the theory to a variety of quantum and topological materials, as well as experimentally confirm the existence of these new waves.
Satvik Bharadwaj, research fellow at Purdue University and study co-author
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On the cover: an artistic illustration of the opening:wave propagation in a three-dimensional lattice of silicon atoms. The red wave is an ordinary electromagnetic wave propagating in a solid. The blue internal wave represents the new predicted picophoton wave. Image: Zubin Jacob, Perdue University