A new study led by Vinod M. Menon and his group at the City College of New York shows that trapping light inside magnetic materials may dramatically enhance their intrinsic properties. Strong optical responses of magnets are important for the development of magnetic lasers and magneto-optical memory devices, as well as for emerging quantum transduction applications.
In their new article in Nature, Menon and his team report the properties of a layered magnet that hosts strongly bound excitons—quasiparticles with particularly strong optical interactions. Because of that, the material is capable of trapping light—all by itself.
As their experiments show, the optical responses of this material to magnetic phenomena are orders of magnitude stronger than those in typical magnets. “Since the light bounces back and forth inside the magnet, interactions are genuinely enhanced,” said Dr. Florian Dirnberger, the lead-author of the study.
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