Optical analogue of the dynamical Casimir effect in a dispersion-oscillating fibre

Stefano Vezzoli (1) , Arnaud Mussot (2) , Niclas Westerberg (1) , A Kudlinski (2) , Hatef Dinparasti Saleh (1) , Angus Prain (1) , Fabio Biancalana (1) , Eric Lantz (3) , Daniele Faccio (1)

1 University of Glasgow
2 PhLAM - Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Atomes et Molécules - UMR 8523
3 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)

The dynamical Casimir effect is the generation of pairs of real particles or photons from the vacuum as a result of a non-adiabatic change of a system parameter or boundary condition. As opposed to standard parametric amplification where the modulation occurs both in space and in time, this fundamental process requires a pure modulation in time, which makes its detection particularly challenging at optical frequencies. In this paper we experimentally demonstrate a realization of the analogue dynamical Casimir effect in the near-infrared optical regime in a dispersion-oscillating photonic crystal fibre. The experiments are based on the equivalence of the spatial modulation of the fibre core diameter to a pure temporal modulation when this is considered in the co-moving frame of the travelling pump pulse. We provide evidence of optical dynamical Casimir effect by measuring quantum correlations between the spectrally resolved photon pairs and prove their non-classical nature with photon anti-bunching.

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]

Stefano Vezzoli, Arnaud Mussot, Niclas Westerberg, A Kudlinski, Hatef Dinparasti Saleh, et al.. Optical analogue of the dynamical Casimir effect in a dispersion-oscillating fibre. Communications Physics, 2019, 2, pp.84. ⟨10.1038/s42005-019-0183-z⟩. ⟨hal-02370693⟩