Toroidal optical transitions in hydrogen-like atoms

Abstract

It is commonly believed that electromagnetic spectra of atoms and molecules can be fully de-scribed by interactions of electric and magnetic multipoles. However, it has recently become clear that interactions between light and matter also involve toroidal multipoles – toroidal ab-sorption lines have been observed in electromagnetic metamaterials. Here we show that a new type of spectroscopy of the hitherto largely neglected toroidal dipolar interaction becomes feasible if, apart from the classical r×r×p toroidal dipole density term responsible for the to-roidal transitions in metamaterials, the spin-dependent r×σ term (that only occurs in relativ-istic quantum mechanics) is taken into account. Toroidal dipole operators are odd under parity and time reversal symmetries; toroidal dipole transitions can therefore be distinguished from electric multipole and magnetic dipole transitions.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ilya Kuprov: orcid.org/0000-0003-0430-2682

ORCID for Nikolai Zheludev: orcid.org/0000-0002-1013-6636

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