2009/08/11 by Rundong Li, Jing Wang, Xiaoliang Qi +1 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.other
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nphys1534
5 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2009/08/11 · arxiv updated 2015/05/13
Axions are very light, very weakly interacting particles postulated more than 30 years ago in the context of the Standard Model of particle physics. Their existence could explain the missing dark matter of the universe. However, despite intensive searches, they have yet to be detected. In this work, we show that magnetic fluctuations of topological insulators couple to the electromagnetic fields exactly like the axions, and propose several experiments to detect this dynamical axion field. In particular, we show that the axion coupling enables a nonlinear modulation of the electromagnetic field, leading to attenuated total reflection. We propose a novel optical modulators device based on this principle.