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Photonic Heat Engines: Science and Applications

Unitary control of photonic absorption and emission

Cheng Guo, Shanhui Fan

Published Mar 12, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Unitary control changes the optical absorption and emission of an object by transforming the external modes. We answer two basic questions: Given an object, what absorptivity, emissivity, and their difference are attainable via unitary control? How to obtain given absorptivity, emissivity, and their difference? We show that both questions can be answered using the mathematics of majorization.

DOI
10.1117/12.3004842

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Unitary control changes the optical absorption and emission of an object by transforming the external modes. We answer two basic questions: Given an object, what absorptivity, emissivity, and their difference are attainable via unitary control? How to obtain given absorptivity, emissivity, and their difference? We show that both questions can be answered using the mathematics of majorization.
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The study of optical effects in active media is rich with unexpected consequences. For instance, one may imagine that absorption and amplification in a dielectric medium will exhibit some sort of symmetry because both are related to the same imaginary part of the dielectric constant, except for a sign change. It turns out that such a symmetry does not exist [1]. This issue has also been investigated in detail for random or disordered gain media, with varying viewpoints [2]. Traditionally, much of the research on amplifying media has considered the interaction of light within the entire volume of such a medium. Recent interest in metamaterials and other esoteric structures in which plasmons are used to manipulate optical signals has brought attention to the role of surface waves in active dielectrics [3, 4]. From a fundamental perspective, the main difference between active and passive media is that spontaneous emission cannot be avoided in gain media. As a result, a rigorous analysis of gain media demands a quantum-mechanical treatment. Spontaneous emission in a gain medium depends not only on the material properties of that medium but also on the optical modes supported by the structure containing that material [5]. By a clever design of this structure (e.g., photonic crystals or microdisk resonators with a metallic cladding), it is possible to control the local density of optical modes and the spontaneous emission process itself. In Chapter 4, we discuss how to model a gain medium under such conditions by deploying optical Bloch equations.
After researching carefully the well known M. Planck’s law of the black-body radiation, the quantum theory of field and the Einstein’s postulates about interaction of the photon with the atoms, there are a lot of unclear questions about photon and its interaction with atom. From all the above questions, there are three main following questions: Why does the energy of a light mode include zero-point energy? Where does the first photon come from in universe? and What is the first fact as a reason of absorption, emission in the photon-atom interaction? To find out the acceptable answers, here we propose postulates about the zero-photon and then about the new concepts of photon. Using them, we have tried to describe the basic characters of the photon and explain the photon-atom interaction in other way: the spin-spin interaction. Our results showed out the different picture of mechanism of the photon-atom interaction, the existence of the zero-photon energy, the absorption as well as the emission rule and its probabilities.