October 2016
Spotlight Summary by David Paganin
Unidirectional x-ray output from a crystal waveguide affected by Berry’s phase
The famous Berry phase has been described as "the phase that launched a thousand scripts". Aside from its understatement, this phrase neatly embodies the enormity of Berry´s idea and its historical antecedents. Indeed, the implications of this monumental idea continue to be felt to this day, across an extremely wide panorama of physics and engineering.
The present Optics Express paper by Takei, Kohmura, Ishikawa and Sawada gives experimental evidence for an earlier theoretical prediction of a new implication of the Berry phase, previously published by Sawada and colleagues. This gives an extremely interesting and powerful additional means for manipulating hard x-rays, using distorted crystal waveguides. The effect might be described as an "x-ray elevator", since the deformed crystal can translate the x-ray beam by a significant distance parallel to the optic axis while maintaining both its divergence and its wavefront.
With a few well-known exceptions, hard x-rays are notoriously difficult to manipulate, relative to their visible-light counterparts. The present paper, which experimentally demonstrates this ability to impose a large parallel shift in the optical axis in a hard-x-ray beam, is an important advance which I warmly commend to your attention.
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The present Optics Express paper by Takei, Kohmura, Ishikawa and Sawada gives experimental evidence for an earlier theoretical prediction of a new implication of the Berry phase, previously published by Sawada and colleagues. This gives an extremely interesting and powerful additional means for manipulating hard x-rays, using distorted crystal waveguides. The effect might be described as an "x-ray elevator", since the deformed crystal can translate the x-ray beam by a significant distance parallel to the optic axis while maintaining both its divergence and its wavefront.
With a few well-known exceptions, hard x-rays are notoriously difficult to manipulate, relative to their visible-light counterparts. The present paper, which experimentally demonstrates this ability to impose a large parallel shift in the optical axis in a hard-x-ray beam, is an important advance which I warmly commend to your attention.
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Article Information
Unidirectional x-ray output from a crystal waveguide affected by Berry’s phase
Dai Takei, Yoshiki Kohmura, Tetsuya Ishikawa, and Kei Sawada
Opt. Express 24(21) 24544-24550 (2016) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF