A team of researchers has designed a two-dimensional photonic time crystal that they say could have applications in technologies such as transmitters and lasers.
Despite their name, time crystals have little in common with photonic time crystals, a phase of matter first proposed in 2012 and Observed after several years. The basic similarity is that both crystals have structural patterns with time, but time crystals are quantum materials—atoms suspended in a quantum state—while photonic time crystals are synthetic materials that are not found in nature.e and they Quantum states are not necessarily suspended.
Researchers have had difficulty making and manipulating 3D photonic time crystals, so a recent team tried something different: slimming the material down to just 0.08 inches (2 meters).illimeters) thick. their Crystals amplify light at microwave frequencies. meExam results are published Advances in science today.
“By changing or altering the electromagnetic property of the metasurface over time, we were able to create a 2D photonic time crystal,” said Juchen Wang, a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, in an email to Gizmodo. “Photonic time can reduce crystals from 3D to 2D, making them thinner, lighter and easier to fabricate, just as metasurfaces have been developed in metamaterials.”
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Photonic crystals are optical structures whose ability to refract light changes periodically (ie over time). In lab settings, electromagnetic properties of metamaterials Photonic crystals can be fine-tuned to produce unnaturally good photonics to amplify light waves.
Such crystals have a repeating pattern of photons that makes them coherent, similar to how Pulsed laser patterns help in quantum bits Keep them consistentElongation of the quantum state.
“In (photonic time crystals), energy is not conserved; so the states that reside in the momentum gap can rapidly grow in amplitude,” said Mordechai Segev, a physicist at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology who was not associated with the new paper, in February. Interview with Nature Photonics. “It has a huge impact on the physics involved.”
Most real-world applications of discovery involve devices that rely on Photonics. For example, wireless signals can be enhanced by coating devices on 2D photonic time crystals, making the signal stronger.
Although tea crystal craftsMr Only expands mikeWave frequency, Wang told Gizmodo, is that slight changes in the design allow the crystal to operate at millimeter-wave frequencies, such as those used in 5G communications.
Time will tell how scalable the technology is and how well it works outside of a lab.
MORE: Physicists get a quantum computer to work by blasting it with the Fibonacci sequence
