Hamburg Photon Science Colloquium | Synchrotron radiation from an accelerating light pulse

by Roberto Merlin (Department of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA)

Friday 1 Jun 2018, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/Berlin

CFEL SR I-III (Bldg. 99) (DESY, Hamburg)

We present the observation of synchrotron radiation resulting from a subpicosecond light pulse that moves in a circular path. A metasurface, consisting of an array of plasmonic nanoantennas, was used to guide an infrared pulse along a 100-μm-radius arc inside a LiTaO₃ crystal. The metasurface generates a sel faccelerating wave, which belongs to a novel class of nondiffracting solutions to Maxwell’s equations. Through three-wave mixing, the accelerating light pulse mixes with itself to generate a nonlinear polarization with THz components. As for a charge traversing a circular trajectory in vacuum, the moving nonlinear polarization emits THz synchrotron radiation over a scale of 100 μm, which is the smallest to date.