Study opens new realms of light-matter interaction
A new MIT study could open up new areas of technology based on types of light emission that had been thought to be “forbidden,” or at least so unlikely as to be practically unattainable. The new approach, the researchers say, could cause certain kinds of interactions between light and matter, which would normally take billions of years to happen, to take place instead within billionths of a second, under certain special conditions. The findings, based on a theoretical analysis, are reported today in the journal Science in a paper by MIT doctoral student Nicholas Rivera, Department of Physics Professor Marin Soljačić, Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics John Joannopoulos, and postdocs Ido Kaminer and Bo Zhen. Interactions between light and matter, described by the laws of quantum electrodynamics, are the basis of a wide range of technologies, including lasers, LEDs, and atomic clocks. But from a theoretical standpoint, “Most light-matter interaction processes...