Image of the week: strong fields with optical waveguides

By Thomas Farrell on May 15, 2017

In a new paper published in JPhysB, Merav Kahn and Gilad Marcus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem show that strong field physics and the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a curved optical waveguide can be described with the same Schrödinger Equation. As such, they propose fabricating a curved optical waveguide and using it to simulate strong field physics. They explain that this system could be used to probe wave-functions at any point, including the interesting tunneling zone, where tunnel ionization can be studied.

Detail of a semi-classical trajectory. The green, red and yellow solid lines are the numerical trajectories s of long, short and near cut-off trajectories, respectively. The dotted lines with the red, yellow and pink, are the corresponding semi-classical trajectories, starting from the waveguide core. Taken from Merav Kahn and Gilad Marcus 2017 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 50 095004 © IOP Publishing, All Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License