According to researchers who recently reported that they were successful in coupling light with a multilayer array of incredibly thin magnets, a new type of magnetic quasiparticle has been generated.
The City College of New York's Center for Discovery and Innovation announced the discovery, which was made in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin and may lead to new techniques for creating materials artificially.
A quantity of energy contained within a system, such as a crystalline lattice, that exhibits certain characteristics akin to how a particle acts is known in physics as a quasiparticle.
The study of the particular interactions that can take place between light and matter, according to the researchers, was a crucial factor in their recent success.
In a recent paper, the researchers explained that strong coupling between light and elementary excitations is emerging as a potent tool to engineer the properties of solid-state systems, explaining that such coupling has proven useful in controlling various types of quantum phenomena observed in the lab. This also applies to changes between magnetic phases.
According to Dr. Florian Dirnberger, main author of the latest study, "Research in recent years produced a number of atomically flat magnets that are extraordinarily well-suited to be explored using our approach." According to Dirnberger, the team's discovery has illuminated a hitherto unexplored region in the study of light's interactions with magnetic crystals.
According to the study team's paper, when such light and matter coupling is accomplished with an antiferromagnet, a "previously unseen class of polaritonic quasiparticles emerges from the strong coupling." These magnets are created specifically to generate different types of ordered magnetism, which were initially noticed in experimental research in the early 1930s.
The researchers explain that a microscopic theory combined with a thorough spectroscopic study offers novel insights into the formation and interactions of these exotic magnetically linked excitations. The researchers claim that their work "provides a road towards the creation and control of correlated electron systems using cavity quantum electrodynamics" in addition to incorporating antiferromagnets into the study of light-matter interaction.
Their research's practical implications include the potential use of information systems and data storage and retrieval, among other fields.
According to Vinod M. Menon, a physicist at City College of New York and one of the study's organisers, "using our approach with magnetic materials is a viable road towards effective magneto-optical effects." "Achieving this goal can enable its usage for digital data storage or applications in common devices like lasers."
The research team anticipates that future findings from their work may shed new light on the interactions between quantum materials and light.
Spin-correlated exciton-polaritons in a van der Waals magnet was the title of the team's Nature Nanotechnology article.
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