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Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum fluctuations in dispersive dielectrics

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.
2469-9926
De Liberato, Simone
5942e45f-3115-4027-8653-a82667ed8473
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).

Record type: Article

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.

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Electro-optical sampling of quantum vacuum uctuations in dispersive dielectrics - Accepted Manuscript
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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
ORCID for Simone De Liberato: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4851-2633

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 28 Aug 2019 16:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 08:08

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