The textbook-accepted formulation of electromagnetic force was proposed by Lorentz in the 19th century, but its validity has been challenged due to incompatibility with the special relativity and momentum conservation. The Einstein-Laub formulation, which can reconcile those conflicts, was suggested as an alternative to the Lorentz formulation. However, intense debates on the exact force are still going on due to lack of experimental evidence. Here, we report the first experimental investigation of angular symmetry of optical force inside a solid dielectric, aiming to distinguish the two formulations. The experiments surprisingly show that the optical force exerted by a Gaussian beam has components with the angular mode number of both 2 and 0, which cannot be explained solely by the Lorentz or the Einstein-Laub formulation. Instead, we found a modified Helmholtz theory by combining the Lorentz force with additional electrostrictive force could explain our experimental results. Our results represent a fundamental leap forward in determining the correct force formulation, and will update the working principles of many applications involving electromagnetic forces.
The strong ellipticity dependence of high-harmonic generation in gases enables numerous experimental techniques that are nowadays routinely used, for instance, to create isolated attosecond pulses. Extending such techniques to high-harmonic generation in solids requires a fundamental understanding of the microscopic mechanism of the high-harmonic generation. Here, using extensive first-principles simulations within a time-dependent density-functional framework, we show how intraband and interband mechanisms are strongly and differently affected by the ellipticity of the driving laser field. Th…
The non-linear response of dielectrics to intense, ultrashort electric fields has been a sustained topic of interest for decades with one of its most important applications being femtosecond laser micro/nano-machining. More recently, renewed interests in strong field physics of solids were raised with the advent of mid-infrared femtosecond laser pulses, such as high-order harmonic generation, optical-field-induced currents, etc. All these processes are underpinned by photoionization (PI), namely the electron transfer from the valence to the conduction bands, on a time scale too short for phono…
In the absence of external excitation, light trapped within a dielectric medium generally decays by leaking out, and also by getting absorbed within the medium. We analyze the leaky modes of solid dielectric spheres by examining solutions of Maxwell's equations for simple homogeneous, isotropic, linearly dispersive media that admit complex-valued oscillation frequencies. We show that, under appropriate circumstances, these leaky modes constitute a complete set into which an initial electromagnetic field distribution inside a dielectric sphere can be expanded. We provide the outline of a comple…
The formation of an electron-hole plasma during the interaction of intense femtosecond laser pulses with transparent solids lies at the heart of femtosecond laser processing. Advanced micro- and nanomachining applications require improved control over the excitation characteristics. Here, we relate the emission of low-order harmonics to the strong laser-field-induced plasma formation. Together with a measurement of the total plasma density we identify the contribution of two competing ionization mechanisms - strong-field and electron-impact ionization.
We report the first experimental demonstration of a TE-polarization photonic band gap (PBG) in a 2D isotropic hyperuniform disordered solid (HUDS) made of dielectric media with a index contrast of 1.6:1, very low for PBG formation. The solid is composed of a connected network of dielectric walls enclosing air-filled cells. Direct comparison with photonic crystals and quasicrystals permitted us to investigate band-gap properties as a function of increasing rotational isotropy. We present results from numerical simulations proving that the PBG observed experimentally for HUDS at low index contra…
In this work, we present an in-depth experimental and numerical study of the short-range THz communications links that use subwavelength dielectric fibers for information transmission and define main challenges and tradeoffs in the link implementation. Particularly, we use air or foam-cladded polypropylene-core subwavelength dielectric THz fibers of various diameters (0.57-1.75 mm) to study link performance as a function of the link length of up to ~10 m, and data bitrates of up to 6 Gbps at the carrier frequency of 128 GHz (2.34 mm wavelength). We find that depending on the fiber diameter, th…
The mechanism of ablation of solids by intense femtosecond laser pulses is described in an explicit analytical form. It is shown that at high intensities when the ionization of the target material is complete before the end of the pulse, the ablation mechanism is the same for both metals and dielectrics. The physics of this new ablation regime involves ion acceleration in the electrostatic field caused by charge separation created by energetic electrons escaping from the target. The formulae for ablation thresholds and ablation rates for metals and dielectrics, combining the laser and target p…
The release of conduction-band electrons from a metal surface by a sub-femtosecond extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulse, and their propagation through the solid, provokes a dielectric response in the solid that acts back on the photoelectron wave packet. We calculated the (wake) potential associated with this photoelectron self-interaction in terms of bulk and surface plasmon excitations and show that it induces a considerable, XUV-frequency-dependent temporal shift in laser-streaked XUV photoemission spectra, suggesting the observation of the ultrafast solid-state dielectric response in contempora…
The limited resolution of a conventional optical microscope stems from the fact that the subwavelength information of an object is carried by evanescent waves, which exponentially decays in space and cannot reach the imaging plane. We introduce here a metamaterial solid immersion lens (mSIL), which utilizes closely-packed high-index nanoparticles as a composite media to effectively convert and transport evanescent waves from near-field to far-field. About 20% of evanescent wave energy of an ideal point source can be directed into far-field by mSIL. This has led to the exceptional imaging perfo…
We report enhanced broadband Terahertz (THz) generation and detailed characterization from the interaction of femtosecond two colour laser pulses with thin transparent dielectric tape target in ambient air. The proposed source is easy to implement, exhibits excellent scalability with laser energy. Spectral characterization using Fourier transform spectrometer reveals yield enhancement of more than 150 % in the THz region of 0.1 - 10 THz with respect to conventional two-colour laser plasma source in ambient air. Further, the source spectrum extends up to 40 THz with an enhancement of flux > 30 …
The use of relatively simple structures to achieve high performance refractive index sensors has always been urgently needed. In this work, we propose a lithography-free sensing platform based on metal-dielectric cavity, the sensitivity of our device can reach 1456700 nm/RIU for solution and 1596700 nm/RIU for solid material, and the FOM can be up to 1234500 /RIU for solution and 1900800 /RIU for solid material, which both are much higher than most sensing methods. This sensor has excellent sensing performance in both TE and TM light, and suitable for integrated microfluidic channels. Our sche…
Most optical systems involve a combination of lenses separated by free-space regions where light acquires the required angle-dependent phase delay for a certain functionality. Very recently, flat-optics structures have been proposed to compress these large free-space volumes and miniaturize the overall optical system. However, these early designs can only replace free-space volumes of limited length, or operate in a very narrow angular range, or require a high-index background. These issues raise questions about the applicability of these devices in practical scenarios. Here, we first derive a…
The force of electromagnetic radiation on a dielectric medium may be derived by a direct application of the Lorentz law of classical electrodynamics. While the light's electric field acts upon the (induced) bound charges in the medium, its magnetic field exerts a force on the bound currents. We use the example of a wedge-shaped solid dielectric, immersed in a transparent liquid and illuminated at Brewster's angle, to demonstrate that the linear momentum of the electromagnetic field within dielectrics has neither the Minkowski nor the Abraham form; rather, the correct expression for momentum de…
The recent observation of high-harmonic generation from solids creates a new possibility for engineering fundamental strong-field processes by patterning the solid target with subwavelength nanostructures. All-dielectric metasurfaces exhibit high damage thresholds and strong enhancement of the driving field, making them attractive platforms to control high-harmonics and other high-field processes at nanoscales. Here we report enhanced non-perturbative high-harmonic emission from a Si metasurface that possesses a sharp Fano resonance resulting from a classical analogue of electromagnetically in…
We develop a multipolar theory of second-harmonic generation (SHG) by dielectric nanoparticles made of noncentrosymmetric materials with bulk quadratic nonlinearity. We specifically analyze two regimes of optical excitation: illumination by a plane wave and single-mode excitation, when the laser pump drives the magnetic dipole mode only. Considering two classes of nonlinear crystalline solids (dielectric perovskite material and III-V semiconductor), we apply a symmetry approach to derive selection rules for the multipolar composition of the nonlinear radiation. The developed description can be…
The Keldysh theory of photoionization in a solid dielectric is generalized to the case of arbitrarily short driving pulses of arbitrary pulse shape. We derive a closed-form solution for the nonadiabatic ionization rate in a transparent solid with a periodic dispersion relation, which reveals ultrafast ionization dynamics within the field cycle and recovers the key results of the Keldysh theory in the appropriate limiting regimes.
Nanoparticles levitated in vacuum can be set to spin at ultimate frequencies, limited only by the tensile strength of the material. At such high frequencies, drastic changes to the dynamics of solid-state quantum excitations are to be expected. Here, we theoretically describe the interaction between acoustic phonons and the rotation of a nanoparticle around its own axis, and model how the acoustic and optical properties of the nanoparticle change when it rotates at a fixed frequency. As an example, we analytically predict the scaling of the shape, the acoustic eigenmode spectrum, the permittiv…
We show, via simulations, that an optical fiber taper waveguide can be an efficient tool for photoluminescence and resonant, extinction spectroscopy of single emitters, such as molecules or colloidal quantum dots, deposited on the surface of a thin dielectric membrane. Placed over a high refractive index membrane, a tapered fiber waveguide induces the formation of hybrid mode waves, akin to dielectric slotted waveguide modes, that provide strong field confinement in the low index gap region. The availability of such gap-confined waves yields potentially high spontaneous emission enhancement fa…
At optical frequencies due to the small value of the magnetic permeability of natural materials, the magnetic effects are week. To this end, the natural dielectric materials are unemployable for practical magnetic applications in optics. We have shown that it is possible to induce the intense magnetic hot spots in a Janus dielectric mesoscale particle. The basic idea of the Janus particle based on a combination of the effects of a photonic jet, whispering gallery waves and the concept of solid immersion. Simulations show that H^2/E^2 contrast maybe more 10 and maximal magnetic field intensity …
Casimir forces on suspended thin dielectric membranes covered with graphene
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Laboratoire Charles Coulomb (L2C), UMR 5221 CNRS-Université de Montpellier（夏尔·库隆实验室（L2C），CNRS-蒙彼利埃大学联合研究单位5221）
