MOSCOW, March 11. /TASS/. A research team from Skoltech, MIT, and Yale derived fundamental limits to the optical response of absorptive systems, bounding the largest enhancements possible given intrinsic material losses, Skoltech press service said on Friday.
"An additional benefit of the current approach is that one can bound the responses of anisotropic, magnetic, and/or inhomogeneous media", Skoltech said.
Through basic conservation-of-energy principles, the authors derive geometry-independent limits to per-volume absorption and scattering rates, and to local-density-of-states enhancements that represent the power radiated or expended by a dipole near a material body.
Skoltech professor Athanasios Polimeridis and his colleagues Owen Miller and Homer Reid, postdocs at MIT, Chia Wei Hsu, postdoc at Yale, Brendan Delacy, researcher at Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, John Joannopoulos and Marin Soljacic, professors of Physics at MIT, and Steven Johnson, professor of Mathematics at MIT, have published their results in Optics Express.
Professor Polimeridis works with fundamental optical systems for a long time. The key distinction between this work and previously published papers is that in this paper the authors find limits in the full Maxwell regime, such that the derived bounds apply to any structure at any size scale, and they apply to functions of the scattered fields (e.g. scattered power and radiative LDOS), which have zero amplitude in quasistatic electromagnetism. Finally, in this work the authors also consider the local density of states, which represents an important design application.