Electrically tunable artificial gauge potential for polaritons.

Neutral particles subject to artificial gauge potentials can behave as charged particles in magnetic fields. This fascinating premise has led to demonstrations of one-way waveguides, topologically protected edge states and Landau levels for photons. In ultracold neutral atoms, effective gauge fields have allowed the emulation of matter under strong magnetic fields leading to realization of Harper-Hofstadter and Haldane models. Here we show that application of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields effects a tunable artificial gauge potential for two-dimensional microcavity exciton polaritons. For verification, we perform interferometric measurements of the associated phase accumulated during coherent polariton transport. Since the gauge potential originates from the magnetoelectric Stark effect, it can be realized for photons strongly coupled to excitations in any polarizable medium. Together with strong polariton-polariton interactions and engineered polariton lattices, artificial gauge fields could play a key role in investigation of non-equilibrium dynamics of strongly correlated photons.

Electron mean free path from angle-dependent photoelectron spectroscopy of aerosol particles.

We propose angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy of aerosol particles as an alternative way to determine the electron mean free path of low energy electrons in solid and liquid materials. The mean free path is obtained from fits of simulated photoemission images to experimental ones over a broad range of different aerosol particle sizes. The principal advantage of the aerosol approach is twofold. First, aerosol photoemission studies can be performed for many different materials, including liquids. Second, the size-dependent anisotropy of the photoelectrons can be exploited in addition to size-dependent changes in their kinetic energy. These finite size effects depend in different ways on the mean free path and thus provide more information on the mean free path than corresponding liquid jet, thin film, or bulk data. The present contribution is a proof of principle employing a simple model for the photoemission of electrons and preliminary experimental data for potassium chloride aerosol particles.

Observation of quantum jumps of a single quantum dot spin using submicrosecond single-shot optical readout.

Single-shot readout of individual qubits is typically the slowest process among the elementary single- and two-qubit operations required for quantum information processing. Here, we use resonance fluorescence from a single-electron charged quantum dot to read out the spin-qubit state in 800 nanoseconds with a fidelity exceeding 80%. Observation of the spin evolution on longer time scales reveals quantum jumps of the spin state: we use the experimentally determined waiting-time distribution to characterize the quantum jumps.