|
|
Numerical simulations of light passing through photonic crystals reveal "unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena." by J. William Bell Few, if any, were incredulous of the claims made by John Joannopoulos and his team in May 2003. Joannopoulos is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been a leading light in the photonics world for three decades. He wrote the book, two texts in fact, on his field. But everyone was surprised by the team's findings that a shockwave passing through a photonic crystal could be used to modulate the frequency of light regardless of its intensity, narrow its bandwidth, and trap it for a time. No other known system is capable of these effects. New Scientist magazine put a fine point on it, saying "Claims of 'unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena' are rare in the abstract of a reputable scientific paper. But the latest report [from Joannopoulos' group] does not disappoint." "The degree of control over light really is quite shocking," said Eli Yablonovitch, who developed the first photonic crystal while at Bell Communications Research in the late 1980s. Even the team didn't fully anticipate its discovery, born of numerical simulations conducted in part on NCSA's SGI Origin2000 system and continuing on the center's Titan Linux cluster and IBM p690 supercomputer. "The motivation was to try to find the simplest system that had the periodicity [that all photonic crystals exhibit], have a shock propagate through, and see what happens. These results, these new physical phenomena that came out, were an unexpected consequence of this thought experiment," says Evan Reed, a postdoc in the Joannopoulos lab and lead author on the Physical Review Letters article that announced the findings.
Access Online | Posted 12-16-2003
|
