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Frontiers in Optics

Quantum Effects in the Interaction of Optical Excitations and Fast Electrons

Valerio Di Giulio, Mathieu Kociak, F. Javier Garcı́a de Abajo

Published Jan 1, 2020• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the interaction between fast electrons and confined quantum optical excitations. In particular, we explore the effects that the quantum nature of light induces on the electron wave function and the possibility of retrieving its second-order correlation function through the intensities of the peaks in the electron energy spectrum.

DOI
10.1364/fio.2020.fw5b.6

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We investigate the interaction between fast electrons and confined quantum optical excitations. In particular, we explore the effects that the quantum nature of light induces on the electron wave function and the possibility of retrieving its second-order correlation function through the intensities of the peaks in the electron energy spectrum.
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Abstract The generation of nonclassical light states bears a paramount importance in quantum optics and is largely relying on the interaction between intense laser pulses and nonlinear media. Recently, electron beams, such as those used in ultrafast electron microscopy to retrieve information from a specimen, have been proposed as a tool to manipulate both bright and dark confined optical excitations, inducing semiclassical states of light that range from coherent to thermal mixtures. Here, we show that the ponderomotive contribution to the electron–cavity interaction, which we argue to be significant for low‐energy electrons subject to strongly confined near‐fields, can actually create a more general set of optical states, including coherent and squeezed states. The postinteraction electron spectrum further reveals signatures of the nontrivial role played by A 2 terms in the light–matter coupling Hamiltonian, particularly when the cavity is previously excited by either chaotic or coherent illumination. Our work introduces a disruptive approach to the creation of nontrivial quantum cavity states for quantum information and optics applications, while it suggests unexplored possibilities for electron beam shaping.
The problem of saturation of intersubband absorption and optical rectification in asymmetric quantum wells is discussed theoretically using the density matrix formalism. The effects of the electron-electron interaction are taken into account. It is shown that near the resonance the spectral shapes of the nonlinear optical absorption coefficient and the nonlinear optical rectification coefficient are very similar. In the absence of the electron-electron interaction the spectral responses are nearly Lorentzian. The electron-electron interaction plays an important role in heavy doped systems. In structures with large spatial separation of the ground and the excited states wave functions, the depolarization effect is small and the absorption spectrum is affected mainly by the electrostatic Coulomb interaction. This interaction shifts the absorption peak to higher energy by an amount depending on the intensity of the incident light and leads to the significant distortion (asymmetry) of the line.
We explore the potential of twisted light as a tool to unveil many-body effects in parabolically confined systems. According to the Generalized Kohn Theorem, the dipole response of such a multi-particle system to a spatially homogeneous probe is indistinguishable from the response of a system of non-interacting particles. Twisted light however can excite internal degrees of freedom, resulting in the appearance of new peaks in the even multipole spectrum which are not present when the probe is a plane wave. We also demonstrate the ability of the proposed twisted light probe to capture the transition of interacting fermions into a strongly correlated regime in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. We report that by suitable choice of the probe's parameters, the transition into a strongly correlated phase manifests itself as an approach and ultimate superposition of peaks in the second order quadrupole response. These features, observed in exact calculations for two electrons, are reproduced in adiabatic Time Dependent Density Functional Theory simulations.