{"id":753,"date":"2015-03-24T17:18:02","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T17:18:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/?p=753"},"modified":"2015-03-24T17:18:02","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T17:18:02","slug":"trinity-professor-and-alumnus-capture-photo-of-light-as-both-a-particle-and-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/2015\/03\/24\/trinity-professor-and-alumnus-capture-photo-of-light-as-both-a-particle-and-wave\/","title":{"rendered":"Trinity Professor and Alumnus Capture Photo of Light as Both a Particle and Wave"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists have known for generations that light behaves as both a particle and a wave. Photographs have shown light behaving as one or the other, but never both simultaneously. That changed with a groundbreaking study by Brett Barwick<\/a>, assistant professor of physics, and Erik Qui\u00f1onez \u201914, in collaboration with researchers from Switzerland\u2019s \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne<\/a> (EPFL).<\/p>\n

\"\"Barwick and Qui\u00f1onez, who contributed to the research as an undergraduate student, collaborated both remotely and in person with their counterparts in Switzerland, led by Fabrizio Carbone, a former colleague of Barwick\u2019s at the California Institute of Technology. A Faculty Research Committee grant made it possible for the pair to go to the EPFL for portions of their research. Their paper, \u201cSimultaneous observation of the quantization and the interference pattern of a plasmonic near-field<\/a>,\u201d was published by Nature Communications<\/em> this month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was really exciting to do an experiment that captures both the wave and particle aspects of light in a single image\u201d said Barwick, \u201cand it was particularly satisfying to see a Trinity undergrad, Erik, work with graduate students and postdocs at the EPFL and have the final results end up in Nature Communications<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experiment involved hitting a nanowire with short pulses of a laser light. When the light hits the nanowire it is confined by its very small size and creates a standing wave of a particular form of light called a \u201csurface plasmon polariton.\u201d They then shot a stream of electrons near the wire, which interacted with the light on the nanowire. With a transmission electron microscope, the team was able to observe the behavior of electrons in the near field around the wire, behaving as both a wave and particle. The high speed of the microscope made the elusive photo possible.<\/p>\n

The news of the study was picked up by media across the United States and around the world. The New York Times<\/a><\/em> featured the research in its evening briefing, and science and technology publications around the world, including Popular Science<\/a><\/em>, have highlighted the achievement.<\/p>\n

Two weeks before the publication in Nature Communication<\/em> came out, another paper entitled \u201cCreating electron beams with light<\/a>\u201d, detailing how electron vortex beams can be created with light was published in Optics Express<\/em>, with Trinity alumnus Jonathan Handali \u201913 and current Trinity student Pratistha Shakya \u201915 as co-authors with Barwick.<\/p>\n

Both articles are Open Access<\/em> articles and can be downloaded free from the respective publishers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSimultaneous observation of the quantization and the interference pattern of a plasmonic near-field\u201d is a collaboration among Trinity College\u2019s Department of Physics, the Laboratory for Ultrafast Microscopy and Electron Scattering of EPFL, and the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists have known for generations that light behaves as both a particle and a wave. Photographs have shown light behaving as one or the other, but never both simultaneously. That changed with a groundbreaking study by Brett Barwick, assistant professor of physics, and Erik Qui\u00f1onez \u201914, in collaboration with researchers from Switzerland\u2019s \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,3],"tags":[214,217,218,216,215,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}