Millimeter Wave Localization: Slow Light and Enhanced Absorption
arXiv:cond-mat/0701525 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.76.085118
Abstract
We exploit millimeter wave technology to measure the reflection and transmission response of random dielectric media. Our samples are easily constructed from random stacks of identical, sub-wavelength quartz and Teflon wafers. The measurement allows us to observe the characteristic transmission resonances associated with localization. We show that these resonances give rise to enhanced attenuation even though the attenuation of homogeneous quartz and Teflon is quite low. We provide experimental evidence of disorder-induced slow light and superluminal group velocities, which, in contrast to photonic crystals, are not associated with any periodicity in the system. Furthermore, we observe localization even though the sample is only about four times the localization length, interpreting our data in terms of an effective cavity model. An algorithm for the retrieval of the internal parameters of random samples (localization length and average absorption rate) from the external measurements of the reflection and transmission coefficients is presented and applied to a particular random sample. The retrieved value of the absorption is in agreement with the directly measured value within the accuracy of the experiment.
revised and expanded
References in corpus (10)
- Suppression of Transport of an Interacting Elongated Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Random Potential
- Effect of optical disorder and single defects on the expansion of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional waveguide
- Routes towards Anderson-Like localization of Bose-Einstein condensates in disordered optical lattices
- Experimental observation of the mobility edge in a waveguide with correlated disorder
- Instrumentation for Millimeter-wave Magnetoelectrodynamic Investigations of Low-Dimensional Conductors and Superconductors
- Ultraslow light propagation in an inhomogeneously broadened rare-earth ion-doped crystal
- Superfluidity versus Anderson localization in a dilute Bose gas
- Localization of light in a random grating array in a single mode fiber
- Localized Modes in Open One-Dimensional Dissipative Random Systems
- Resonances in 1D disordered systems: localization of energy and resonant transmission