Radiation pressure in stratified moving media

Abstract

A general theory of optical forces on moving bodies is here developed in terms of generalized 4 × 4 transfer and scattering matrices. Results are presented for a planar dielectric of arbitrary refractive index placed in an otherwise empty space and moving parallel and perpendicular to the slab-vacuum interface. In both regimes of motion the resulting force comprises lateral and normal velocity-dependent components, which may depend in a subtle way on the Doppler effect and s-p-polarization mixing. For lateral displacements in particular, polarization mixing, which is here interpreted as an effective magnetoelectric effect due to the reduced symmetry induced by the motion of the slab, gives rise to a velocity-dependent force contribution that is sensitive to the phase difference between the two polarization amplitudes. This term gives rise to a rather peculiar optical response on the moving body, and specific cases are illustrated for incident radiation of arbitrarily directed linear polarization. The additional force due to polarization mixing may cancel to first order in V /c with the first order Doppler contribution yielding an overall vanishing of the velocity-dependent component of the force on the body. The above findings bear some relevance to modern developments of nano-optomechanics and to the problem of the frictional component of the Casimir force.

Flavour breaking effects in the pseudoscalar meson decay constants

“…Numerically we can also in addition consider a fictitious particle, where a = b = s, which we call η s . We have further extended the expansion to the next-to-next-to-leading or NNLO case, [13]. As the expressions start to become unwieldy, they have been relegated to Appendix A.…”

“…As the expressions start to become unwieldy, they have been relegated to Appendix A. (Octet baryons also have equivalent expansions, [13].) The vacuum is a flavour singlet, so meson to vacuum matrix elements 0| O|M are proportional to 1 ⊗ 8 ⊗ 8 tensors, i.e.…”

Entangled-state engineering of vibrational modes in a multimembrane optomechanical system

“…The transfer-matrix method has been used widely in optics to analyze the propagation of electromagnetic fields especially in multi-layer structures [85]. It has been used to study the scattering problems in optomechanical systems [86][87][88]. For the completeness of the paper, we will first derive intrinsic mode equations of the optomechanical systems with N membranes inside a cavity using the transfer-matrix method.…”

Polariton excitation rates from time dependent dielectrics

“…During recent years, much progress has been made towards a rigorous quantisation scheme that accounts for the effects of dispersion and dissipation, see for example [14,15,[17][18][19][20][21] and references therein. In this work we shall apply the theory presented in [19], which is a generalization of the Huttner-Barnett theory [15] and uses a bath of simple harmonic oscillators to account for the energy lost from the electromagnetic field.…”