[ad_1]
An optical design called Maxwell's Fish Eye Lens could produce a quantum entanglement between atoms separated by an arbitrary distance, show new calculations.
J. Perczel et al., Phys. Rev. A (2018)
Maxwell's Fish-Eye lens, available more than 150 years ago, is an optical system that curves light along arcs that converge to a single point. New theoretical work is studying how a single photon would pass from one atom to another in a fish-eye lens system. The results show that the interaction mediated by photons between atoms is independent of their separation distance, implying that a fish-eye lens could tangle atoms more efficiently than cavity-based devices Similar.
Originally, the fish eye lens is a spherically symmetrical material whose refractive index decreases as one moves away from the center. This lens can focus all light rays emanating from an arbitrary point A to a corresponding point B located on the opposite side of the lens. Recently, researchers have debated whether this focus would be limited by diffraction. Would a detector placed in B record a perfect image of a source emitting A?
In their quantum approach to this debate, Janos Perczel, Peter Kómár and Mikhail Lukin, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Harvard University, replace the source and detector with single atoms. They imagine the atoms in a 2D version of the eye of the fish and calculate that a photon emitted by an atom will initially extend and fill the entire area of the lens before focusing on the position of the second atom. This concentration is limited by diffraction, which implies that the fish eye can not produce perfect images. However, the second atom effectively absorbs the photon, which results in a strong interaction to entangle the atoms. The authors propose to test these predictions with photons confined in a thin layered structure in which the refractive index varies as a fish-eye lens.
This research is published in Physical Review A.
-Michael Schirber
Michael Schirber is a correspondent editor for Physics based in Lyon, France.
Topics
Source link
