Abstract
Recent progress in photonics has led to a renewed interest in time-varying media that change on timescales comparable to the optical wave oscillation time. However, these studies typically overlook the role of material dispersion that will necessarily imply a delayed temporal response or, stated alternatively, a memory effect. We investigate the influence of the medium memory on a specific effect, i.e. the excitation of quantum vacuum radiation due to the temporal modulation. We construct a framework which reduces the problem to single-particle quantum mechanics, which we then use to study the quantum vacuum radiation. We find that the delayed temporal response changes the vacuum emission properties drastically: frequencies mix, something typically associated with nonlinear processes, despite the system being completely linear. Indeed, this effect is related to the parametric resonances of the light-matter system, and to the parametric driving of the system by frequencies present locally in the drive but not in its spectrum.
Highlights
Light experiences dispersion as it passes through an optical medium, such as the glass in your window or the water in your glass, and different frequencies appear to be travelling at different rates
Optical dispersion is well known, and is accurately described by the theory of macroscopic electrodynamics [9, 10], in which one ignores the microscopic make-up of the medium, replacing the chain of absorption and re-emission processes of the constituents with a phenomenological frequency-dependent permittivity ε
We have studied quantum vacuum radiation excited by temporal changes to the resonance frequency of an optical medium
Summary
Any further distribution of timescales comparable to the optical wave oscillation time These studies typically overlook this work must maintain attribution to the the role of material dispersion that will necessarily imply a delayed temporal response or, stated author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation alternatively, a memory effect. We find that the delayed temporal response changes the vacuum emission properties drastically: frequencies mix, something typically associated with nonlinear processes, despite the system being completely linear. This effect is related to the parametric resonances of the light-matter system, and to the parametric driving of the system by frequencies present locally in the drive but not in its spectrum
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