More efficient light traps, capable of capturing it while keeping all its properties intact over time, pave the way for new quantum technologies.
The result is published in the journal Nature and is the result of research coordinated by Italy, with Gianluigi Zito of the Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems of the National Research Council, and conducted in collaboration with the University of Singapore and the Lawrence National Laboratories Berkeley, California.
Among the new technologies that can now be created, there are sensors capable of detecting individual particles of light, photons.
"Our work has made it possible to significantly improve a type of device that already existed, a sort of photon trap, similar to vortices in which light is captured and kept isolated from the outside", Vito Mocella, of the 'Isasi-Cnr is one of the authors of the study.
"We have greatly improved the efficiency of these traps, into which it was previously difficult to get photons to enter, and we have coupled them with a second state of light, capable of communicating with the outside". defined as 'supercritical coupling', in which individual photons are trapped, 'freezing' their characteristics, without losing their energy and kept in what are called 'continuum bound states' or Bic.
Under these conditions, photons can be guided and released in a controlled way, as has never been possible before.
Trapped in the form of Bic, the photons cannot escape and for this reason they are said to enter a sort of dark mode, in which it becomes possible to manipulate them and use them for applications in the field of quantum technologies.
For Xiaogang Liu, of the University of Singapore, "this breakthrough is not only a fundamental discovery, but represents a paradigm shift in the field of nanophotonics that changes our understanding of the manipulation of light at the nanometric level."
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