Slow light

Space-time wave packets are optical pulses synthesized from light waves carrying strong correlations between their spatial and temporal degrees of freedom and show many anomalous behaviors such as superluminal propagation. In this study, the authors proposed a way of amplifying space-time wave packets by nonlinear optical parametric processes, which will widen the applications of the new optical wave packets.

Slow light effects are interesting for telecommunications and quantum photonics applications. Here, the authors use coupled exciton-surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in a hybrid monolayer WSe₂-metallic waveguide structure to demonstrate a 1300-fold reduction of the SPP group velocity.

Exceptional points in nanostructured lossy photonic waveguides lead to uniformly distributed losses and linear amplitude decay.