Confirming the trilinear form of the optical magnetoelectric effect in the polar honeycomb antiferromagnet Co2Mo3O8

Magnetoelectric phenomena are intimately linked to relativistic effects and also require the material to break spatial inversion symmetry and time-reversal invariance. Magnetoelectric coupling can substantially affect light–matter interaction and lead to non-reciprocal light propagation. Here, we confirm on a fully experimental basis, without invoking either symmetry-based or material-specific assumptions, that the optical magnetoelectric effect in materials with non-parallel magnetization (M) and electric polarization (P) generates a trilinear term in the refractive index, δn ∝ k ⋅ (P × M), where k is the propagation vector of light. Its sharp magnetoelectric resonances in the terahertz regime, which are simultaneously electric and magnetic dipole active excitations, make Co2Mo3O8 an ideal compound to demonstrate this fundamental relation via independent variation of M, P, and k. Remarkably, the material shows almost perfect one-way transparency in moderate magnetic fields for one of these magnetoelectric resonances.

Dynamical Casimir–Polder force in a semi-infinite rectangle waveguide

In this paper, we study the dynamical Casimir–Polder force between an ensemble of identical two-level atoms and the wall of a rectangle waveguide with semi-infinite length. With the presence of both the rotating wave and counter rotating wave terms in the light–matter interaction Hamiltonian, we utilize the perturbation theory to solve the Heisenberg equation. Up to the seconder of coupling strength, we obtain the energy shift analytically and the Casimir–Polder force numerically. Our result shows that the dynamical behavior of the Casimir force is closely connected to the photon propagation in the waveguide. Therefore, we hope this work will stimulate the studies about the quantum effect in waveguide scenario.

Image polaritons in van der Waals crystals

Polaritonic modes in low-dimensional materials enable strong light–matter interactions and the manipulation of light on nanometer length scales. Very recently, a new class of polaritons has attracted considerable interest in nanophotonics: image polaritons in van der Waals crystals, manifesting when a polaritonic material is in close proximity to a highly conductive metal, so that the polaritonic mode couples with its mirror image. Image modes constitute an appealing nanophotonic platform, providing an unparalleled degree of optical field compression into nanometric volumes while exhibiting lower normalized propagation loss compared to conventional polariton modes in van der Waals crystals on nonmetallic substrates. Moreover, the ultra-compressed image modes provide access to the nonlocal regime of light–matter interaction. In this review, we systematically overview the young, yet rapidly growing, field of image polaritons. More specifically, we discuss the dispersion properties of image modes, showcase the diversity of the available polaritons in various van der Waals materials, and highlight experimental breakthroughs owing to the unique properties of image polaritons.

Large-scale ab initio simulation of light–matter interaction at the atomic scale in Fugaku

In the field of optical science, it is becoming increasingly important to observe and manipulate matter at the atomic scale using ultrashort pulsed light. For the first time, we have performed the ab initio simulation solving the Maxwell equation for light electromagnetic fields, the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation for electrons, and the Newton equation for ions in extended systems. In the simulation, the most time-consuming parts were stencil and nonlocal pseudopotential operations on the electron orbitals as well as fast Fourier transforms for the electron density. Code optimization was thoroughly performed on the Fujitsu A64FX processor to achieve the highest performance. A simulation of amorphous SiO2 thin film composed of more than 10,000 atoms was performed using 27,648 nodes of the Fugaku supercomputer. The simulation achieved excellent time-to-solution with the performance close to the maximum possible value in view of the memory bandwidth bound, as well as excellent weak scalability.

Plasmon Enhanced Light-matter Interaction of Rice-like Nanorods by Cube-plate Nanocavity

Plasmonic nanocavity is widely used for enhancing light-matter interaction. Here, an efficient plasmonic nanocavity of the cube-plate system is constructed for the fluorescence enhancement of rice-like CdSe/CdS Nanorods (NRs) with...

Photoluminescence enhancement with all-dielectric coherent metasurfaces

Mie resonances have recently attracted much attention in research on dielectric metasurfaces, owning to their enriched multipole resonances, negligible optical loss, and efficient light emitter integration. Although there is a rapid advancement in this field, some fundamental developments are still required to provide a simpler and more versatile paradigm for photoluminescence (PL) control. In this work, we proposed that an all-dielectric coherent metasurface can engineer the PL response by tuning the array size. Such PL manipulation is attributed to the collective Mie resonances that mediate the inter-unit interactions between unit elements and alter the PL intensity. Metasurfaces with different chip sizes are utilized to explore the array size effect on the collective Mie resonances, field enhancement, and Q-factor in TiO2 metasurfaces. Incorporating the all-dielectric coherent metasurface with fluorescent photon emitters, we performed the dependence of PL enhancement on array size, which achieves an enhancement factor of ∼10 at the central area of a 90 × 90 μm2 TiO2 metasurface array. These findings provide an additional degree of freedom to engineer the near-field confinement and enhancement, allowing one to manipulate incoherent photon emission and tune light–matter interaction at the nanoscale.