Shaping long-lived electron wavepackets for customizable optical spectra
Name
optica-6-8-1089.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.89 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
0986764bf6248f487b2b5b33550e54c1
Author(s)
Dangovski, Rumen
Rivera, Nicholas H.
Soljacic, Marin
Kaminer, Ido
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Optica
Publisher
The Optical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement Electrons in atoms and molecules are versatile physical systems allowing a vast range of light–matter interactions. Spontaneous emission, which appears in a wide variety of applications, depends crucially on the bound electron energy levels. The discrete nature of these electron energy levels and the ionization threshold constrain the energy scale of all light–matter interactions involving bound electrons. To bypass these constraints, we take ideas from optical and electronic beam shaping and propose creating new electron states as superpositions of extended states above the ionization threshold. We show that such superpositions enable the control of spontaneous emission with tunable spectra in the eV–keV range. We find that the specific shaping lengthens the diffraction and radiative lifetimes of the wavepackets in exchange for increasing their spatial spreads. Our approach could have applications toward developing novel kinds of light emitters at hard-to-access spectral ranges.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.6.001089
