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Optics

Negative reaction

Nature Physics volume 9, pages 755–756 (2013)Cite this article

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Light pulses with positive and negative effective masses are now generated using optical fibres. Nonlinear interactions between the two can then create self-accelerating pulse pairs, opening a new route to pulse steering.

Despite our modern notion of light as massless relativistic particles, light propagation in materials is routinely treated in terms of the dynamics of massive particles obeying Newton's laws3. Photonic-lattice structures offer a way of controlling the effective mass of these light 'particles' because their dispersion relation can be engineered. A band that curves upwards in a plot of frequency versus wave vector has positive effective mass, whereas a band that curves downwards exhibits negative mass. Light pulses of both positive and negative effective mass may therefore populate a photonic lattice. But the self-accelerating bound state requires more than just control over effective mass; it also requires a mutual force between pulses. This can be induced by the optical nonlinearity of the material in the region where the pulses overlap.

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Figure 1: Self-accelerating particles.

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  1. Thomas Philbin is in the Physics and Astronomy Department, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QL, UK,

    Thomas Philbin

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Correspondence to Thomas Philbin.

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Philbin, T. Negative reaction. Nature Phys 9, 755–756 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2786

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