Observation of Toroidal Pulses of Light
arXiv:2102.03636 · doi:10.1038/s41566-022-01028-5
Abstract
The transverse electromagnetic waves are major information and energy carriers. In 1996, Hellwarth and Nouchi theoretically identified a radically different, non-transverse type of electromagnetic pulses of toroidal topology. These pulses, which are propagating counterparts of localized toroidal dipole excitations in matter and exhibit unique electromagnetic wave properties, have never been observed before. Here, we report the generation and characterization of such optical and terahertz Toroidal Light Pulses (TLPs), launched from tailored nanostructured metasurfaces comprising toroidal emitters. This achievement paves the way for experimental studies of energy and information transfer with TLPs, their space-time "entanglement", and their light-matter interactions involving anapoles, localized space-time entangled excitations, skyrmions, and toroidal qubits that are of growing interest for the fundamental science of light and applications.
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Cited by in corpus (30)
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- Roadmap on spatiotemporal light fields
- Self-healing of structured light: a review
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- On-Chip Optical Skyrmionic Beam Generators
- Observation of acoustic spatiotemporal vortices
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- The Application of Tailored Fields for Studying Chirality and Symmetry
- Topological near fields generated by topological structures
- Flying doughnut terahertz pulses generated from semiconductor currents
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- Photonic torons, topological phase transition and tunable spin monopoles
- Spatio-temporal optical vortices: principles of description and basic properties
- Space-Time Hopfion Crystals
- Spin/momentum properties of the paraxial optical beams
- Rotated chirped volume Bragg gratings for compact spectral analysis
- Spacetime magnetic hopfions: from internal excitations and braiding of skyrmions
- Ultra-compact synthesis of space-time wave packets
- Propagation Dynamics of Photonic Toroidal Vortices Mediated by Orbital Angular Momenta
- Topological Polarisation States
- Toroidal optical transitions in hydrogen-like atoms
- Photonic Quantum Chromo-Dynamics
- Terahertz generation via all-optical quantum control in 2D and 3D materials
- Observation of helical pulses
- Simultaneous Superoscillations in Space and Time in Nonseparable Light Pulses
- Space-time non-separable dynamics of ultrashort vortex pulse with power exponential spectrum