Photonic Time Crystals

 


Photonic time crystals are exotic materials that exponentially amplify light. A huge team from around the world are involved, as it opens up possibilities across fields like imaging and sensing and other optical devices. The study was published in Nature Photonics.

Viktar Asadchy is from Aalto University in Finland. He reports, "This work could lead to the first experimental realization of photonic time crystals, propelling them into practical applications and potentially transforming industries from high-efficiency light amplifiers and advanced sensors to innovative laser technologies, this research challenges the boundaries of how we can control the light-matter interactions."

Photonic time crystals are in a unique class of optical materials. Normal crystals have spatially repeating structures. Photonic time crystals are uniform in space but show an occasional oscillation in time. This creates "momentum band gaps." These are unusual states where light momentarily stops inside the crystal, all while the intensity grows overtime. 

One application for the photonic time crystal is nanosensing. Asadchy explains, "Imagine we want to detect the presence of a small particles, such as a virus, pollutant, or biomarker for diseases like cancer. When excited, the particle would emit a tiny amount of light at a specific wavelength. A photonic time crystal can capture this light an automatically amplify it, enabling more efficient detection with existing equipment."

Due to need for rapid and also large amplitude variation of material properties, creating photonic time crystals is difficult. The best demonstration previously shown used much lower frequencies, namely microwaves. In the latest work, the team proposes a practical novel method to creation of "truly optical" photonic time crystals.


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