Observation of discrete-light temporal refraction by moving potentials with broken Galilean invariance.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38937459.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-49747-3 and PMC identifier 11211399.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Refraction is a basic beam bending effect at two media's interface. While traditional studies focus on stationary boundaries, moving boundaries or potentials could enable new laws of refractions. Meanwhile, media's discretization plays a pivotal role in refraction owing to Galilean invariance breaking principle in discrete-wave mechanics, making refraction highly moving-speed dependent. Here, by harnessing a synthetic temporal lattice in a fiber-loop circuit, we observe discrete time refraction by a moving gauge-potential barrier. We unveil the selection rules for the potential moving speed, which can only take an integer v = 1 or fractional v = 1/q (odd q) value to guarantee a well-defined refraction. We observe reflectionless/reflective refractions for v = 1 and v = 1/3 speeds, transparent potentials with vanishing refraction/reflection, refraction of dynamic moving potential and refraction for relativistic Zitterbewegung effect. Our findings may feature applications in versatile time control and measurement for optical communications and signal processing.