Recent advances of transition radiation: fundamentals and applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the fundamental principles and recent developments in transition radiation, highlighting its diverse applications in particle detection, radiation sources, beam diagnostics, and surface wave excitation, with future prospects involving engineered nanostructures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in transition radiation, emphasizing new applications and the potential for manipulation using advanced materials and nanostructures.

Findings

Transition radiation can emit light at any frequency regardless of particle velocity.

Recent applications include high-energy particle detection and surface wave excitation.

Future research will focus on manipulating transition radiation with engineered materials.

Abstract

Transition radiation is a fundamental process of light emission and occurs whenever a charged particle moves across an inhomogeneous region. One feature of transition radiation is that it can create light emission at arbitrary frequency under any particle velocity. Therefore, transition radiation is of significant importance to both fundamental science and practical applications. In this paper, we provide a brief historical review of transition radiation and its recent development. Moreover, we pay special attention to four typical applications of transition radiation, namely the detection of high-energy particles, coherent radiation sources, beam diagnosis, and excitation of surface waves. Finally, we give an outlook for the research tendency of transition radiation, especially its flexible manipulation by exploiting artificially-engineered materials and nanostructures, such as gain materials, metamaterials, spatial-temporal materials, meta-boundaries, and layered structures with a periodic or non-periodic stacking.