“We injected photons into the system at one mode and made them fan out along the frequency scale as if they were a bunch of marbles overflowing from one container into nearest-neighboring ones,” which replicated “expected real-space behavior using a synthetic dimension relating to photons (which are quite unlike particles of typical matter we deal with every day),” Balčytis explained. In the new experiment led by Balčytis, a ring resonator divided light up into a comb-like pattern that enabled the researchers to arrange photons along a one-dimensional lattice and control the movement of those photons.
Ring resonators are devices that split light into a variety of complicated patterns and forms for scientific purposes, often optics or photonics. “So, while not quite probing into the nature of reality on a cosmic scale,” he added, these studies can “help answer fundamental questions about nature through the growing role topology has in explaining it.” “There are many predicted effects that can be either explored to satiate curiosity or harnessed for creating innovative on-chip devices,” Balčytis said. As an example, synthetic dimensions can be used to investigate light’s behavior in exotic topological contexts, which can help to answer fundamental questions in optics and photonics while also opening up practical innovations in telecommunications, computing, and other applied fields. By combining multiple different synthetic dimension variables it is also possible to emulate models beyond 3D.”īalčytis notes that synthetic dimensions have become an “intense focus” in many fields of physics, especially with regards to topology, a branch of geometry that describes objects in continuous deformations, such as a twisted Möbius strip. By extension, a chain of synthetic dimension devices can act like a 2D array and so forth. “In this way you can have a single device (like the ring in our study) stand in for a linear chain of rings. “The key to synthetic dimensions is that it is possible to use some other variable of the system that is not generally thought of as spatial (frequency of light waves, polarization, delay between pulses etc.) as if it represented an additional coordinate,” he continued. To create a synthetic dimension, Balčytis explained, scientists experimentally model an extra plane using some other variable, like a frequency.
Experimental science is much more limited however, since the materials we have or devices we can create, operate within the boundaries of our three-dimensional space (our team works with integrated photonic microchips, arranged on a flat surface, so we only have two dimensions from the outset).”
“These can sometimes have useful or at least intriguing implications for experimentalists to check. “Mathematicians have it easy in that they can make assumptions or construct models (either more or less related to objects in the real world) and extend them to higher dimensions as far as their imagination allows,” said Balčytis in an email. In addition to demonstrating a new method of producing synthetic dimensions, the results will enable further experiments “that could model phenomena beyond three dimensions,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. Now, in a first-of-its-kind experiment, scientists led by Armandas Balčytis, a research fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, have created a synthetic dimension, a tiny photonic device known as a silicon ring resonator.
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