Trapping light with a twister
Researchers at MIT who succeeded last year in creating a material that could trap light and stop it in its tracks have now developed a more fundamental understanding of the process. The new work — which could help explain some basic physical mechanisms — reveals that this behavior is connected to a wide range of other seemingly unrelated phenomena. The findings are reported in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, co-authored by MIT physics professor Marin Soljačić; postdocs Bo Zhen, Chia Wei Hsu, and Ling Lu; and Douglas Stone, a professor of applied physics at Yale University. Light can usually be confined only with mirrors, or with specialized materials such as photonic crystals. Both of these approaches block light beams; last year’s finding demonstrated a new method in which the waves cancel out their own radiation fields. The new work shows that this light-trapping process, which involves twisting the polarization...