News and Events

Light-matter interaction is a long-discussed topic in physics, which leads to many interesting effects. One of them is the virtual photons in vacuum cavity resonators: after putting a sample into vacuum cavity field, if the light-matter interaction is strong enough, there is a finite expectation value for the photon number. Because of optical field energy quantization, the coupling strength is determined by the cavity mode volume, and the use of metallic split-ring THz electromagnetic resonators allows us to realize the ultra-strong coupling regime. In this way, we need to take electrons and photons equally and study their effects on each other. We find that since all the electrons in the cavity are coupled with the same photonic Hilbert space, there is an equivalent type of interactions among electrons. We plan to focus on this type of cavity-mediated electron interactions and explore its effects on the electrons’ transport properties and illuminated properties, which may provide us with a potential approach to manipulating material electrons via vacuum cavity field.