Observation of toroidal pulses of light

By A. Zdagkas, C. McDonnell, Junhong Deng, Yijie Shen, Guixin Li, T. Ellenbogen, N. Papasimakis, Nikolay I. Zheludev. Nature Photonics, 2021

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transverse electromagnetic waves are important carriers of information and energy. In 1996, Hellwarth and Nouchi theoretically identified a radically different, non-transverse type of electromagnetic pulse with a toroidal topology. These pulses, which are propagating counterparts of localized toroidal dipole excitations in matter, exhibit unique electromagnetic wave properties and, so far, have never been experimentally realized and observed. Here we report the generation of such toroidal light pulses in the optical and terahertz regions by the use of tailored nanostructured meta-surfaces. This achievement paves the way for experimental studies of energy and information transfer with toroidal light pulses, their space–time coupling and their light–matter interactions involving anapoles, localized space–time coupled excitations, skyrmions and toroidal qubits, which are of growing interest for the fundamental science of light and applications. Pulses of light with a toroidal structure are experimentally realized in the terahertz and optical regions.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2901710b674251e0d235986f8ba6153ea38f904

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Citations in the corpus

Nonseparable States of Light: From Quantum to Classical (2022, background): “Moreover, taking advantage of recent advances in the metasurfaces [130], the generation of such pulse was also proposed [139], and observed experimentally in recent times [95], where the metamaterial converter can be constructed by a cylindrically symmetric array of low Qfactor dipole resonators ori”
Optical skyrmions and other topological quasiparticles of light (2022, unknown): “The experimental generation of toroidal pulses can be achieved using a radially polarised pulse interaction with a gradient metasurface designed to achieve space-time coupling [81].”
Roadmap on spatiotemporal light fields (2022, background): “To date, only the fundamental TLPs have been experimentally generated in the optical and THz part of the spectrum [106], while the other members of the family have only been studied theoretically.”