Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 5, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/srep17760
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Funding
- DFG [Forschergruppe 760, PE 523/10-1]
- Cluster of Excellence Engineering of Advanced Materials (EAM)
- School of Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT)
- NSF [ECCS-1128520]
- AFOSR [FA9550-12-1-0148, FA9550-14-1-0037]
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Light propagation in periodic environments is often associated with a number of interesting and potentially useful processes. If a crystalline optical potential is also linearly ramped, light can undergo periodic Bloch oscillations, a direct outcome of localized Wannier-Stark states and their equidistant eigenvalue spectrum. Even though these effects have been extensively explored in conservative settings, this is by no means the case in non-Hermitian photonic lattices encompassing both amplification and attenuation. Quite recently, Bloch oscillations have been predicted in parity-time-symmetric structures involving gain and loss in a balanced fashion. While in a complex bulk medium, one intuitively expects that light will typically follow the path of highest amplification, in a periodic system this behavior can be substantially altered by the underlying band structure. Here, we report the first experimental observation of Bloch oscillations in parity-time-symmetric mesh lattices. We show that these revivals exhibit unusual properties like secondary emissions and resonant restoration of PT symmetry. In addition, we present a versatile method for reconstructing the real and imaginary components of the band structure by directly monitoring the light evolution during a cycle of these oscillations.
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