Efficient light harvesting and photon sensing via engineered cooperative effects

Efficient devices for light harvesting and photon sensing are fundamental building blocks of basic energy science and many essential technologies. Recent efforts have turned to biomimicry to design the next generation of light-capturing devices, partially fueled by an appreciation of the fantastic efficiency of the initial stages of natural photosynthetic systems at capturing photons. In such systems extended excitonic states are thought to play a fundamental functional role, inducing cooperative coherent effects, such as superabsorption of light and supertransfer of photoexcitations. Inspired by this observation, we design an artificial light-harvesting and photodetection device that maximally harnesses cooperative effects to enhance efficiency. The design relies on separating absorption and transfer processes (energetically and spatially) in order to overcome the fundamental obstacle to exploiting cooperative effects to enhance light capture: the enhanced emission processes that accompany superabsorption. This engineered separation of processes greatly improves the efficiency and the scalability of the system.

Uncertainty relations for mesoscopic coherent light

Thermodynamic uncertainty relations unveil useful connections between fluctuations in thermal systems and entropy production. This work extends these ideas to the disparate field of zero temperature quantum mesoscopic physics where fluctuations are due to coherent effects and entropy production is replaced by a cost function. The cost function arises naturally as a bound on fluctuations, induced by coherent effects—a critical resource in quantum mesoscopic physics. Identifying the cost function as an important quantity demonstrates the potential of importing powerful methods from non-equilibrium statistical physics to quantum mesoscopics.

Disorder-induced splitting in quasiparticle interference of Bi2Te3 Dirac electrons

Inelastic interactions of quantum systems with environment usually wash coherent effects out. In the case of Friedel oscillations, the presence of disorder leads to a fast decay of the oscillation amplitude. Here we show both experimentally and theoretically that in the three-dimensional topological insulator Bi2Te3 the finite lifetime of the Dirac electrons due to disorder causes a splitting of coherent scattering vectors which follows a peculiar evolution in energy. Not only this splitting enables evaluating the lifetime of Dirac quasiparticles in topological insulators, but this general phenomenon can be in play in other quantum systems, leading to non-trivial modifications of their coherent properties.

Мгновенные спекл-модулированные интерференционные изображения и когерентные эффекты в оптической микроскопии тонких слоев

The formation of instantaneous speckle-modulated interference images of thin transparent layers in an optical microscope under an illuminating quasi-monochromatic or frequency broadband wave field with wide angular spectra and coherent effects are considered. Instantaneous speckle-modulated interference images of the layer in the transverse and longitudinal sections of the total wave field reflected by the layer are obtained by numerical simulation of the spatial distributions of the complex amplitude of the wave fields reflected by the layer faces and their superposition. The results of computer simulation of instantaneous speckle-modulated and experimentally observed averaged interference images of the layer under quasi-monochromatic and frequency broadband illuminating layer field with different width of the angular spectrum are presented. The mutual correlation of instantaneous speckle fields reflected by the layer faces and the effects of the influence of the width of the angular and frequency spectra of the illuminating field on the contrast of experimentally observed interference images of the layer are studied numerically. On the basis of the instantaneous speckle-modulation of the wave field the physical mechanism of the influence of angular width and the width of the frequency spectra of the illuminating field on the mutual coherence of the interfering wave fields is investigated.