An Archimedes' Screw for Light

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optical analog of an Archimedes' Screw that captures and amplifies light using chiral space-time media, revealing new solutions to Maxwell's equations and enabling tunable, chirally selective amplification.

Contribution

It presents the first optical Archimedes' Screw, providing exact analytic solutions for chiral space-time media and demonstrating potential for tunable, chirally selective light amplification.

Findings

Demonstrates light capture and amplification using a novel optical screw.

Provides exact solutions to Maxwell's equations in chiral media.

Shows potential for tunable, chirally selective amplification.

Abstract

An Archimedes' Screw captures water, feeding energy into it by lifting it to a higher level. We introduce the first instance of an optical Archimedes' Screw, and demonstrate how this system is capable of capturing light, dragging it and amplifying it. We unveil new exact analytic solutions to Maxwell's Equations for a wide family of chiral space-time media, and show their potential to achieve chirally selective amplification within widely tunable parity-time-broken phases. Our work, which may be readily implemented via pump-probe experiments with circularly polarized beams, opens a new direction in the physics of time-varying media by merging the rising field of space-time metamaterials and that of chiral systems, and may form a new playground for topology and non-Hermitian physics, with potential applications to chiral spectroscopy and sensing.