A breakthrough in photonic time crystals may end up reshaping the way light is used and controlled—good news for future lasers, nanosensors, and optical computing. And it’s a fitting way for the photonics world to wave goodbye to 2024, kick off the holiday season, and roll into 2025.
An international team of researchers, led by Viktar Asadchy, a professor in the department of electronics and nanoengineering at Aalto University in Finland, and Xuchen Wang, a postdoc researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, recently designed what’s believed to be the first realistic photonic time crystals. These metasurfaces are known for their bizarre electromagnetic properties—which are uniform in space, but periodically modulated in time. This generates a momentum bandgap in which light grows exponentially.
The quest to design photonic time crystals for visible light was a longstanding barrier, and to crack it the team combined theoretical models and electromagnetic simulations for “truly optical” photonic time crystals.
Their advance could lead to the “first experimental realization of photonic time crystals and propel them into practical applications such as high-efficiency light amplifiers, advanced sensors, and innovative laser technologies,” says Asadchy. Significantly, it has potential to redefine the boundaries of the way light-matter interactions are controlled.
If Asadchy’s and Wang’s names sound familiar, you might recall reading about their work creating two-dimensional (2D) photonic time crystal metasurfaces back in 2023. It’s always fun for us at Laser Focus World to get to see someone making cool advances go on to take it even further. Congrats to Asadchy, Wang, and everyone involved!
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Sally Cole Johnson | Editor in Chief
Sally Cole Johnson, Laser Focus World’s editor in chief, is a science and technology journalist who specializes in physics and semiconductors. She wrote for the American Institute of Physics for more than 15 years, complexity for the Santa Fe Institute, and theoretical physics and neuroscience for the Kavli Foundation.