Nanostructured Filaments Produce Bright Light Waves that Twirl as They Travel

Nanostructured Filaments Produce Bright Light Waves that Twirl as They Travel

Bright, twisted light can be produced thanks to nanostructured filaments with twisted geometry, according to scientists at the University of Michigan.

Planck’s law ignores but does not prohibit black-body radiation (BBR) from being circularly polarized. BBR from nanostructured filaments with twisted geometry from nanocarbon or metal has strong ellipticity from 500 to 3000 nanometers. The submicrometer-scale chirality of these filaments satisfies the dimensionality requirements imposed by fluctuation-dissipation theorem and requires symmetry breaking in absorptivity and emissivity according to Kirchhoff’s law. The resulting BBR shows emission anisotropy and brightness exceeding those of conventional chiral photon emitters by factors of 10 to 100. Image credit: Lu et al., doi: 10.1126/science.adq4068.

Support authors and subscribe to content

This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.

Subscribe

Gain access to all our Premium contents.
More than 100+ articles.

Buy Article

Unlock this article and gain permanent access to read it.
Exit mobile version