Mina Morshed Behbahani

arXiv2023

Mass and Shape Determination of Optically Levitated Nanoparticles

When introducing a nanoparticle into an optical trap, its mass and shape are not immediately apparent. We combine a charge-based mass measurement with a shape determination method based on light scattering and an analysis of the damping rate anisotropy, all on the same set of silica nanoparticles, trapped using optical tweezers in vacuum. These methods have previously only been used separately, and the mass determination method has not been applied to asymmetric particles before. We demonstrate that the combination of these classification techniques is required to distinguish particles with similar mass but different shape, and vice versa. The ability to identify these parameters is a key step for a range of experiments on precision measurements and sensing using optically levitated nanoparticles.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2016

Spontaneous emission and the operation of invisibility cloaks: Can the invisibility cloaks render objects invisible in quantum mechanic domain?

As a probe to explore the ability of invisibility cloaks to conceal objects in the quantum mechanics domain, we study the spontaneous emission rate of an excited two-level atom in the vicinity of an ideal invisibility cloaking. On this base, first, a canonical quantization scheme is presented for the electromagnetic field interacting with atomic systems in an anisotropic, inhomogeneous and absorbing magnetodielectric medium which can suitably be used for studying the influence of arbitrary invisibility cloak on the atomic radiative properties. The time dependence of the atomic subsystem is obtained in the Schrodinger picture. By introducing a modified set of the spherical wave vector functions, the Green tensor of the system is calculated via the continuous and discrete methods. In this formalism, the decay rate and as well the emission pattern of the aforementioned atom are computed analytically for both weak and strong coupling interaction, and then numerically calculations are done to demonstrate the performances of cloaking in the quantum mechanics domain. Special attention is paid to different possible orientations and locations of atomic system near the spherical invisibility cloaking. Results in the presence and the absence of the invisibility cloak are compared. We find that the cloak works very well far from its resonance frequency to conceal a macroscopic object, whereas at near the resonance frequency the object is more visible than the situation that the object is not covered by the cloak.

quant-ph↗