Engineers discover a new gatekeeper for light

A gatekeeper is an entity that controls access to something. Gatekeeper plays various roles in different sectors such as academic admissions, financial advising, news editing. In other words, a person in charge of a gate, usually to identify, count, supervise, the traffic or flow through it. It acts as a guardian or monitor.

Recently, an engineer from University at Buffalo (UB) developed a new device called ‘Bloch wave resonance: new gatekeeper for light‘. This device is very carefully transparent to the different wavelength of light in one movement. It then blurred them by following a minute adjustment.

Discovery of this new gatekeeper for light:

The discovery has to do with periodic materials. It means they are containing those parts or units which repeat. The crystals which come inside this class like certain parts of butterfly wings does have periodic structure helps to give them color by reflecting specific colors of light. The term ‘Periodic structure‘ is defined as his structure of chemical elements arranged according to their atomic numbers.

Since from 20th century, Scientists are familiar with periodic materials has some special characteristics when it comes in front of light. As butterfly wings do, these materials reflect light. If you understand the internal structure of a periodic material, you can use Bragg’s law equation to identify which wavelength will pass through the material and which will be blocked due to reflection. (Bragg’s law gives the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice and its equation is 2Æ›= 2d sin ÆŸ).

But this study by engineers proves that a completely periodic material structure is not essential for such type of anticipated reflection occurs. The matching effects take place when you sandwich a non-periodic material between two circumference layers of material which has periodic shape. This arrangement will be transparent to certain wavelengths of light and blurred others. After that, engineers are able to instantly alter that wavelength that is allowed through by plainly moving one of the periodic circumferences.

The effect is also applied to a broad range of wave phenomena that span the quantum to the continuation scale.

Victor A. Pogrebnyak, an adjunct associate professor of electrical engineering at University of Buffalo (UB), said, “We have shown that Bragg’s law is a special case of a more generalized phenomenon that was discovered in this study and named as a Bloch wave resonance.”

The main advantage of that Bloch wave resonance offers to enable the blocking of a larger range of wavelength simultaneously than earlier known effects explained by Bragg’s law.

Edward Furlani, Pogrebnyak’s co-author and a UB professor in the Departments of Biological Engineering and Electrical Engineering said, “Electrons behave as waves that also exhibit a Bloch resonance, which can be used as a powerful method to control current in nonelectric circuits.”

Applications of this new gatekeeper of light:

  • It can enable powerful and different abilities in a wide range of electronic and optical devices.
  • In transistor basis components.
  • Other components that switch on and off.
  • In photonics, Nano- electronics, optics and sound and of various sectors of science and technology that achieves band gap wave phenomena for practical use.
  • In white light lasers and a new type of fast switching transistors.

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