Matter waves are a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics, being half of wave–particle duality. All matter exhibits wave-like behavior. For example, a beam of electrons can be diffracted just like a beam of light or a water wave.
The quantum Zeno effect is a feature of quantum-mechanical systems allowing a particle's time evolution to be slowed down by measuring it frequently enough with respect to some chosen measurement setting.
An atom interferometer is an interferometer which uses the wave character of atoms. Similar to optical interferometers, atom interferometers measure the difference in phase between atomic matter waves along different paths. Today, atomic interference is typically controlled with laser beams. Atom interferometers have many uses in fundamental physics including measurements of the gravitational constant, the fine-structure constant, the universality of free fall, and have been proposed as a method to detect gravitational waves. They also have applied uses as accelerometers, rotation sensors, and gravity gradiometers.
An optical microcavity or microresonator is a structure formed by reflecting faces on the two sides of a spacer layer or optical medium, or by wrapping a waveguide in a circular fashion to form a ring. The former type is a standing wave cavity, and the latter is a traveling wave cavity. The name microcavity stems from the fact that it is often only a few micrometers thick, the spacer layer sometimes even in the nanometer range. As with common lasers, this forms an optical cavity or optical resonator, allowing a standing wave to form inside the spacer layer or a traveling wave that goes around in the ring.
Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) or superluminescence is light, produced by spontaneous emission, that has been optically amplified by the process of stimulated emission in a gain medium. It is inherent in the field of random lasers.
In physics, an atomic mirror is a device which reflects neutral atoms in a way similar to the way a conventional mirror reflects visible light. Atomic mirrors can be made of electric fields or magnetic fields, electromagnetic waves or just silicon wafer; in the last case, atoms are reflected by the attracting tails of the van der Waals attraction. Such reflection is efficient when the normal component of the wavenumber of the atoms is small or comparable to the effective depth of the attraction potential. To reduce the normal component, most atomic mirrors are blazed at the grazing incidence.
In atomic physics, a ridged mirror is a kind of atomic mirror, designed for the specular reflection of neutral particles (atoms) coming at a grazing incidence angle. In order to reduce the mean attraction of particles to the surface and increase the reflectivity, this surface has narrow ridges.
Quantum reflection is a uniquely quantum phenomenon in which an object, such as a neutron or a small molecule, reflects smoothly and in a wavelike fashion from a much larger surface, such as a pool of mercury. A classically behaving neutron or molecule will strike the same surface much like a thrown ball, hitting only at one atomic-scale location where it is either absorbed or scattered. Quantum reflection provides a powerful experimental demonstration of particle-wave duality, since it is the extended quantum wave packet of the particle, rather than the particle itself, that reflects from the larger surface. It is similar to reflection high-energy electron diffraction, where electrons reflect and diffraction from surfaces, and grazing incidence atom scattering, where the fact that atoms can also be waves is used to diffract from surfaces.
Atom optics "refers to techniques to manipulate the trajectories and exploit the wave properties of neutral atoms". Typical experiments employ beams of cold, slowly moving neutral atoms, as a special case of a particle beam. Like an optical beam, the atomic beam may exhibit diffraction and interference, and can be focused with a Fresnel zone plate or a concave atomic mirror.
A fiber laser is a laser in which the active gain medium is an optical fiber doped with rare-earth elements such as erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, thulium and holmium. They are related to doped fiber amplifiers, which provide light amplification without lasing.
Coherent addition of lasers is a method of power scaling. It allows increasing the output power and brightness of single-transversal mode laser.
A disk laser or active mirror (Fig.1) is a type of diode pumped solid-state laser characterized by a heat sink and laser output that are realized on opposite sides of a thin layer of active gain medium. Despite their name, disk lasers do not have to be circular; other shapes have also been tried. The thickness of the disk is considerably smaller than the laser beam diameter. Initially, this laser cavity configuration had been proposed and realized experimentally for thin slice semiconductor lasers.
Power scaling of a laser is increasing its output power without changing the geometry, shape, or principle of operation. Power scalability is considered an important advantage in a laser design. This means it can increase power without changing outside features.
Round-trip gain refers to the laser physics, and laser cavities. It is gain, integrated along a ray, which makes a round-trip in the cavity.
Interferometric microscopy or imaging interferometric microscopy is the concept of microscopy which is related to holography, synthetic-aperture imaging, and off-axis-dark-field illumination techniques. Interferometric microscopy allows enhancement of resolution of optical microscopy due to interferometric (holographic) registration of several partial images and the numerical combining.
Francisco Javier "Frank" Duarte is a laser physicist and author/editor of several books on tunable lasers.
An optical transistor, also known as an optical switch or a light valve, is a device that switches or amplifies optical signals. Light occurring on an optical transistor's input changes the intensity of light emitted from the transistor's output while output power is supplied by an additional optical source. Since the input signal intensity may be weaker than that of the source, an optical transistor amplifies the optical signal. The device is the optical analog of the electronic transistor that forms the basis of modern electronic devices. Optical transistors provide a means to control light using only light and has applications in optical computing and fiber-optic communication networks. Such technology has the potential to exceed the speed of electronics, while conserving more power. The fastest demonstrated all-optical switching signal is 900 attoseconds, which paves the way to develop ultrafast optical transistors.
Photonic molecules are a form of matter in which photons bind together to form "molecules". They were first predicted in 2007. Photonic molecules are formed when individual (massless) photons "interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass". In an alternative definition, photons confined to two or more coupled optical cavities also reproduce the physics of interacting atomic energy levels, and have been termed as photonic molecules.
Elisabeth Giacobino is a French physicist specialized in laser physics, nonlinear optics, quantum optics and super-fluidity. She is one of the pioneers of quantum optics and quantum information. She graduated from Pierre and Marie Curie University and started working at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where she has spent the majority of her professional career. She has been an invited professor at New York University and University of Auckland. She has over 230 publications and over 110 invited presentations in international conferences. She has been the coordinator of four European projects and is a member of Academia Leopoldina as well as a fellow member of the European Physical Society, the European Optical Society and the Optical Society of America.
Bruce W. Shore was an American theoretical physicist known for his works in atomic physics and the theory of the interaction of light with matter.
