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Scientists have previously established that light can slow down in certain scenarios, and the new study takes what is hoped to be one of the most useful approaches to date to slow it down. There are proven ways to achieve this.
Researchers from China’s Guangxi University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who were behind this breakthrough, say their method could benefit computing and optical communications.
Light hurtling through the void of space moves at one speed and one speed only. That’s 299,792 kilometers (about 186,000 miles) per second. But if you throw a confused electromagnetic field into its path, such as the electromagnetic field that surrounds ordinary matter, its extraordinary speed begins to slow down.
Most transparent materials slow the light only slightly. It is the change in speed that causes light to bend as it passes from one medium to another. But actually applying the brakes requires special materials such as photonic crystals or extremely cooled quantum gases.
“We believe our work provides a completely new direction for realizing ultra-strong light-matter interactions in nanophotonics chips,” the researchers wrote in their published paper.
This new method builds on a method known as electromagnetic induction transparency (EIT), which cleverly uses lasers to manipulate electrons in a gas stored in a vacuum, essentially making it opaque. It changes from transparent to transparent.
This means that laser light can pass through it, but the way it operates also slows it down. While this is of great interest to physicists, this approach also means that a lot of light and energy is lost along the way.
To reduce this loss and improve the overall efficiency of the system, the researchers incorporated some of the principles of EIT to control light and designed new materials that slow the light. This material is a kind of metasurface, a synthetic his 2D structure with properties not found in nature.
The metasurfaces designed by the team are made of extremely thin layers of silicon, similar to today’s computing chips, and are far better at retaining and emitting energy (in this case, light) than existing options. It was shown that
According to the results obtained by the researchers, this system can slow down light by more than 10,000 times. At the same time, optical loss is reduced by more than 5 times compared to other comparable methods.
The key to the new approach is how the smallest components of the metasurface, called metaatoms, are arranged. In this case, they are close enough that they can essentially merge, thus affecting how light is processed as it passes through.
Ultimately, this complex science will allow us to better control how light travels. There are many potential applications, as light plays a key role in everything from broadband internet to quantum computing.
Although scientists have not yet discovered that this is the only way to slow down light further beyond the natural slowdown that occurs in substances like water, its effectiveness and scalability warrant further investigation. has become a promising option.
“With these findings, our work opens new avenues for tuning light flow in metasurfaces,” the researchers wrote.
This study nano letter.
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