Photonic Aharonov–Bohm effect in photon–phonon interactions
Abstract
The Aharonov–Bohm effect is one of the most intriguing phenomena in both classical and quantum physics, and associates with a number of important and fundamental issues in quantum mechanics. The Aharonov–Bohm effects of charged particles have been experimentally demonstrated and found applications in various fields. Recently, attention has also focused on the Aharonov–Bohm effect for neutral particles, such as photons. Here we propose to utilize the photon–phonon interactions to demonstrate that photonic Aharonov–Bohm effects do exist for photons. By introducing nonreciprocal phases for photons, we observe experimentally a gauge potential for photons in the visible range based on the photon– phonon interactions in acousto-optic crystals, and demonstrate the photonic Aharonov–Bohm effect. The results presented here point to new possibilities to control and manipulate photons by designing an effective gauge potential.
Additional Information
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. Received 05 November 2013; Accepted 09 January 2014; Published 30 January 2014. This work was supported in part by the Centre of Excellence (CUDOS, project number CE110001018) and Laureate Fellowship (FL120100029) programmes of the Australian Research Council (ARC), the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant no. FA9550-09-1-0704), the US National Science Foundation (grant no. ECCS-1201914) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 31271871 and 60877049). We would like to thank Dr Eric Magi for his help on the experiments involved in this work. Author contributions: E.L. and B.J.E. conceived the photon–phonon interaction scheme and experiments. E.L. designed the experimental set-up and performed the measurements. K.F. and S.F. developed the theory. All authors contributed to the discussion of the results and the writing of the manuscript. Competing financial interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests.Attached Files
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC3916835
- Eprint ID
- 44190
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20140307-093008546
- CE110001018
- Australian Research Council
- FL120100029
- Australian Research Council
- FA9550-09-1-0704
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
- ECCS-1201914
- NSF
- 31271871
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 60877049
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Created
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2014-03-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field