2018/11/30 by Niclas Westerberg, Angus Prain, Daniele Faccio +1
Chemistry · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Acoustics #Chemistry #Computational physics #Dispersion (optics) #Excitation #Four-wave mixing #Mathematics #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Mixing (physics) #Modulation (music) #Nonlinear optics #Nonlinear system #Optics #Oscillation (cell signaling) #Parametric statistics #Photonics #Physics #Quantum #Quantum mechanics #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Radiation #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Vacuum energy #Vacuum state #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/2399-6528/ab2ab2
published as J. Phys. Commun. 3, 065012 (2019) · 16 pages + appendices, 3 figures. Accepted for publication
openalex publication_date 2019/06/01 · arxiv created 2019/07/18 · arxiv updated 2019/07/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract Recent progress in photonics has led to a renewed interest in time-varying media that change on timescales comparable to the optical wave oscillation time. However, these studies typically overlook the role of material dispersion that will necessarily imply a delayed temporal response or, stated alternatively, a memory effect. We investigate the influence of the medium memory on a specific effect, i.e. the excitation of quantum vacuum radiation due to the temporal modulation. We construct a framework which reduces the problem to single-particle quantum mechanics, which we then use to study the quantum vacuum radiation. We find that the delayed temporal response changes the vacuum emission properties drastically: frequencies mix, something typically associated with nonlinear processes, despite the system being completely linear. Indeed, this effect is related to the parametric resonances of the light-matter system, and to the parametric driving of the system by frequencies present locally in the drive but not in its spectrum.