Determining the Increase or Decrease of Photon Momentum: Dielectric or Plasmonic Mie Object at Air-Liquid Interface

Abstract

Though the interfacial tractor beam experiment supports the increase of photon momentum (i.e., Minkowski momentum), it is still a matter of investigation whether, inside matter, the photon momentum always increases. Considering the inhomogeneous or heterogeneous background, we have demonstrated that if the background and the half-immersed object are both non-absorbing, the transferred photon momentum to the object can be considered as the one of Minkowski exactly at the interface. In contrast, the presence of loss inside matter, either in the half-immersed object (i.e., plasmonic or lossy dielectric) or in the background, changes the whole situation. For such cases, our several demonstrations and proposed thought experiments have strongly supported the decrease of photon momentum instead of the usual perception of its increase. Although almost all the major radiation pressure experiments have so far supported the linear increase of photon momentum, our proposed simple experimental set-ups may introduce a novel way to observe and verify the exactly opposite proposal: the Abraham momentum of photon. Finally, as an interesting sidewalk, based on several parameters, a machine learning based system has been developed to predict the transferred momentum of photon within a very short time avoiding time-consuming full simulation.