An Archimedes' Screw for Light
arXiv:2109.14460 · doi:10.1038/s41467-022-30079-z
Abstract
An Archimedes' Screw captures water, feeding energy into it by lifting it to a higher level. We introduce the first instance of an optical Archimedes' Screw, and demonstrate how this system is capable of capturing light, dragging it and amplifying it. We unveil new exact analytic solutions to Maxwell's Equations for a wide family of chiral space-time media, and show their potential to achieve chirally selective amplification within widely tunable parity-time-broken phases. Our work, which may be readily implemented via pump-probe experiments with circularly polarized beams, opens a new direction in the physics of time-varying media by merging the rising field of space-time metamaterials and that of chiral systems, and may form a new playground for topology and non-Hermitian physics, with potential applications to chiral spectroscopy and sensing.
References in corpus (10)
- Giant gyrotropy due to electromagnetic coupling
- Dynamics of light propagation in spatiotemporal dielectric structures
- Optical time reversal from time-dependent Epsilon-Near-Zero media
- Temporal multilayer structures for designing higher-order transfer functions using time-varying metamaterials
- Wood Anomalies and Surface-Wave Excitation with a Time-Grating
- Temporal Switching to Extend the Bandwidth of Thin Absorbers
- Spectral Causality and the Scattering of Waves
- Strong Spatial Dispersion in Time-Modulated Dielectric Media
- Photon localisation and Bloch symmetry breaking in luminal gratings
- Space-Time Metasurfaces for Perfect Power Combining of Waves