{"id":2119,"date":"2015-10-01T11:51:53","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T15:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ebuckhor\/?page_id=1747"},"modified":"2015-10-01T11:51:53","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T15:51:53","slug":"barwick-alumnus-co-author-paper","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/along-the-walk\/barwick-alumnus-co-author-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"Barwick, Alumnus Co-Author Paper"},"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\u00a0Brett Barwick<\/a>, assistant professor of physics, and Erik Qui\u00f1onez \u201914, in collaboration with researchers from Switzerland\u2019s\u00a0\u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne<\/a>\u00a0(EPFL).<\/p>\n

Barwick and Qui\u00f1onez, who contributed to the research when he was an undergraduate student, collaborated with their counterparts in Switzerland, led by Fabrizio Carbone, Barwick\u2019s former colleague 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>\u00a0in March.<\/p>\n

\"Erik<\/a>
Erik Quino\u00f1ez \u201914, Pratistha Shakya \u201915, and Assistant Professor of Physics Brett Barwick
Photo by John Atashian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt was really exciting to do an experiment that captures both the wave and particle aspects of light in a single image,\u201d Barwick said, \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\u00a0Nature Communications<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experiment involved hitting a nanowire with short pulses of a laser light. When the light hit the nanowire, it was confined by its very small size and created 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 that 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 a particle.<\/p>\n

News of the study was picked up by media around the world, including\u00a0The New York Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Popular Science<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The paper was a collaboration among Trinity\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

Two weeks before the publication in\u00a0Nature Communications<\/em>\u00a0came out, another paper, titled \u201cCreating electron beams with light<\/a>,\u201d detailing how electron vortex beams can be created with light, was published in\u00a0Optics Express<\/em>, with Trinity alumni Jonathan Handali \u201913 and Pratistha Shakya \u201915 as co-authors with Barwick.<\/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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"parent":1466,"menu_order":12,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-full-width.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2119\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-fall2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}