In collaboration with Ori Katz’s team, we have shown in this Letter how to design an optical cavity such that a weakly absorbing film inside of it can perfectly absorb coherent laser light that is both spatially and spectrally broadband. Congratulations to Helmut and Lena for developing the theory behind this concept and many thanks to Oliver for the nice figure here on top!
Together with Lukas Rachbauer, Dorian Bouchet and Ulf Leonhardt we published an invited tutorial in JOSAB on how to find the optimal quantum states of light for micromanipulation and metrology. The article is openly accessible at this link.
Together with the team of Dave Phillips in Exeter and our former group member Michael Horodynski, we published an article in Science Advances that demonstrates how shaping the wavefront of light can be used to create efficient optical tweezers (i.e., very stiff traps for particles). For more details see the press releases of Exeter University and of the Austrian Press Agency.
In a nice collaboration with the team of Romain Fleury at EPFL and our former Marie-Curie fellow Nicolas Bachelard from Bordeaux, we published an article in Nature Physics that demonstrates how audible sound can be used to steer and rotate objects in complex environments. See the News&Views article by Emmanuel Fort and the highlight in Physics World for more information. Here is also a video on how an origami lotus flower is moved through our sound technique.
In collaboration with the team of Ulrich Kuhl in Nice and with Dorian Bouchet in Grenoble, we published an article in Nature Physics that demonstrates how the information that waves acquire about an object flows from this object to an outside observer. From our group Jakob Hüpfl, Felix Russo and Lukas Rachbauer were principally involved in this study – congratulations! See the News&Views article by Arthur Goetschy, TU Wien’s press release or the Highlights on Pro-Physik or on Physics World for more information.
Together with the team of Coskun Kocabas in Manchester and Sahin Ozdemir from Penn State University, we published a paper in Science showing that thermal emission can be localised at a topological interface. The image shown demonstrates this effect for the example of light emission from the complex boundary of the United Kingdom. Check out the news pieces on our work.
In a new theory paper by Oliver and Dmitry just published in Physical Review Letters, we show that placing two atoms into a “fish eye cavity” results in a periodic emission and absorption of a single photon between them – similar to an ultrafast ping-pong game at the speed of light. See the press release of TU Wien for more information.
Together with the team of Jörg Schmiedmayer at the Atominstitut, we demonstrated how to halt and then trigger the super-radiant decay of an ensemble of inverted Nitrogen-Vacany spins in diamond. From our group, Oliver performed the calculations, reaching very good agreement with the experimental data. For more details see the corresponding open access paper in Physical Review Letters and the associated press release from TU Wien.
Our work on cooling multiple levitated particles with wavefront shaping has jointly been published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A. The two articles were selected for coverage in Physics and received the PRA Editors’ Suggestion. Special thanks go to Jakob and Nicolas for a lot of work in a long but rewarding process!
Nature Physics featured in its September issue an Insight collection dedicated to “Complex Optics” and invited several teams to provide their input to this focus issue. Together with Hui Cao and Allard Mosk we contributed a review article on “Shaping the propagation of light in complex media” that has now been published here. Many thanks go to Hui and Allard for the great collaborative effort and to Nina Meinzer and her team for putting this issue together!
