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Here's arxiv.org version (Nature Photonics version is of course pay walled): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13341.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13341.pdf Abstract
by jari_mustonen 6y ago
Here's arxiv.org version (Nature Photonics version is of course pay walled):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13341.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13341.pdf
Abstract for those who don't bother:
Refraction at the interface between two materials is fundamental to the interaction of light with photonic
devices and to the propagation of light through the atmosphere at large. Underpinning the traditional rules for the refraction of an optical field is the tacit presumption of the separability of its spatial and temporal degrees-of-freedom. We show here that endowing a pulsed beam with precise spatio-temporal spectral correlations unveils remarkable refractory phenomena, such as group-velocity invariance with respect to the refractive index, group-delay cancellation, anomalous group-velocity increase in higherindex materials, and tunable group velocity by varying the angle of incidence. A law of refraction for ‘space-time’ wave packets encompassing these effects is verified experimentally in a variety of optical
materials. Space-time refraction defies our expectations derived from Fermat’s principle and offers new opportunities for molding the flow of light and other wave phenomena.
- cs702 6y agoThanks for sharing. The paper is interesting, and not clickbaitty like the article. The link should probably be changed to the arXiv web page: "Anomalous refraction of optical space-time wave packets" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13341 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13341).
- khana 6y agowhat are 'space-time' wave packets then?
- klyrs 6y agoDunno why this comment was dead, I'd love to see a good ELI5 here
- pas 6y agoThe quantum mechanical probability wave (which is a photon, or maybe there's a difference, but we don't know yet).
- cycomanic 6y agoEssentially, in this paper it's a light wave were the spatial and temporal dimensions are not easily separable. What the authors seem to do here is essentially do a time dependent spatial correlation of a light pulse, which then exhibits "unintuitive" properties. The paper reads a little bit, like several similar papers in the field, where something relatively trivial is packed into a nice sounding story. That said I have not read the details yet and there might be something more profound.