Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum fluctuations in dispersive dielectrics
Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum fluctuations in dispersive dielectrics
Electro-optical sampling has been recently used to perform spectrally-resolved measurements of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations and it has been predicted it could be used to probe the population of virtual photons predicted to exist in the ground state of an ultrastrongly light-matter coupled system. In order to understand which information on the ground state of an interacting system can be acquired thanks to this technique, in this paper we will develop the quantum theory of electro-optical sampling in arbitrary dispersive dielectrics. Our theory shows that a measure of the time correlations of the vacuum fluctuations effectively implements an ellipsometry measurement on the quantum vacuum, allowing to access the frequency-dependent dielectric function without the need of any resonant incoming photon. We discuss consequences of these results on the possibility to use electro-optical sampling to access the virtual photon population.
De Liberato, Simone
5942e45f-3115-4027-8653-a82667ed8473
September 2019
De Liberato, Simone
5942e45f-3115-4027-8653-a82667ed8473
De Liberato, Simone
(2019)
Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum fluctuations in dispersive dielectrics.
Physical Review A - Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, 100 (3), [031801].
(doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.100.031801).
Abstract
Electro-optical sampling has been recently used to perform spectrally-resolved measurements of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations and it has been predicted it could be used to probe the population of virtual photons predicted to exist in the ground state of an ultrastrongly light-matter coupled system. In order to understand which information on the ground state of an interacting system can be acquired thanks to this technique, in this paper we will develop the quantum theory of electro-optical sampling in arbitrary dispersive dielectrics. Our theory shows that a measure of the time correlations of the vacuum fluctuations effectively implements an ellipsometry measurement on the quantum vacuum, allowing to access the frequency-dependent dielectric function without the need of any resonant incoming photon. We discuss consequences of these results on the possibility to use electro-optical sampling to access the virtual photon population.
Text
Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum uctuations in dispersive dielectrics
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 21 August 2019
e-pub ahead of print date: 5 September 2019
Published date: September 2019
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 433582
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/433582
ISSN: 2469-9926
PURE UUID: 6f409c2c-69d5-47f7-b9cd-81b6fd64b54d
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Date deposited: 28 Aug 2019 16:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 08:08
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