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Photons excited into ground state modes at finite temperature display partitioning among photon phases, lifetimes and distances travelled since creation. These distributions set the distance from an interface a created photon has some chance of emission. Excited photons at each frequency have a phase velocity set by each mode propagation index which determines mode density and internal energy contribution. All photons emitted after striking an interface obliquely are refracted. Their exit intensities are then irreversible except when weak internal attenuation occurs. At low temperature attenuation index is small so reversibility is approximate. As temperature rises refraction direction varies. Total emission remains reversible after transitioning through a non equilibrium state with no other heat inputs. In equilibrium the densities of excitations that create and annihilate photons are in balance with photon densities while emissivity depends on both indices and internal incident direction. Modelled exit intensities from pure water and crystalline silica contain strong resonant intensities and match data accurately. Intrinsic resonances formed within liquids and compounds are due to photon modes hybridising with localized excitations, including molecular oscillations and the anharmonic component of lattice distortions. They explain the many resonant spectral intensities seen in remote sensing. Each hybrid oscillator is a photonic virtual bound state whose energy fluctuates between levels separated by mode energy. Refraction induces solid angle changes and often anomalous refraction while thermal recycling of internally reflected photons modifies intensities and internal energy. Enhanced internal heat flux from phonon drag by photon density gradients under an external temperature gradient is also predicted., Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures

We theoretically and numerically study the efficiency of Brillouin-based opto-acoustic data storage in a photonic waveguide in the presence of thermal noise and laser phase noise. We compare the physics of the noise processes and how they affect different storage techniques, examining both amplitude and phase storage schemes. We investigate the effects of storage time and pulse properties on the quality of the retrieved signal, and find that phase storage is less sensitive to thermal noise than amplitude storage., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures

We present a numerical method for modelling noise in Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS). The model applies to dynamic cases such as optical pulses, and accounts for both thermal noise and phase noise from the input lasers. Using this model, we compute the statistical properties of the optical and acoustic power in the pulsed spontaneous and stimulated Brillouin cases, and investigate the effects of gain and pulse width on noise levels. We find that thermal noise plays an important role in the statistical properties of the fields, and that laser phase noise impacts the SBS interaction when the laser coherence time is close to the time-scale of the optical pulses. This algorithm is applicable to arbitrary waveguide geometries and material properties, and thus presents a versatile way of performing noise-based SBS numerical simulations, which are important in signal processing, sensing, microwave photonics and opto-acoustic memory storage., Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures

We theoretically and numerically study the effects of thermal noise on pulses in backwards Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS). Using a combination of stochastic calculus and numerical methods, we derive a theoretical model that can be used to quantitatively predict noise measurements. We study how the optical pulse configuration, including the input powers of the pump and Stokes fields, pulse durations and interaction time, affects the noise in the output Stokes field. We investigate the effects on the noise of the optical loss and waveguide length, and we find that the signal-to-noise ratio can be significantly improved, or reduced, for specific combinations of waveguide properties and pulse parameters., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures

Effective transport properties of heterogeneous structures are predicted by geometric microstructural parameters, but these can be difficult to calculate. Here, a boundary element code with a recurrent series method accurately and efficiently determines the high order parameters of polygonal and conformal prisms in regular two-dimensional lattices and Voronoi tessellations (VT). This reveals that proximity to simpler estimates is associated with: centroidal VT (cf random VT), compactness, and VT structures (cf similarly compact semi-regular lattices). An error in previously reported values for triangular lattices is noted.

Alternative materials are required to enhance the efficacy of plasmonic devices. We discuss the optical properties of a number of alloys, doped metals, intermetallics, silicides, metallic glasses and high pressure materials. We conclude that due to the probability of low frequency interband transitions, materials with partially occupied d-states perform poorly as plasmonic materials, ruling out many alloys, intermetallics and silicides as viable. The increased probability of electron-electron and electron-phonon scattering rules out many doped and glassy metals., Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables

We use electronic structure calculations based upon density functional theory to search for ideal plasmonic materials among the alkali noble intermetallics. Importantly, we use density functional perturbation theory to calculate the electron-phonon interaction and from there use a first order solution to the Boltzmann equation to estimate the phenomenological damping frequency in the Drude dielectric function. We discuss the necessary electronic features of a plasmonic material and investigate the optical properties of the alkali-noble intermetallics in terms of some generic plasmonic system quality factors. We conclude that at low negative permittivities, KAu with a damping frequency of 0.0224 eV and a high optical gap to bare plasma frequency ratio, outperforms gold and to some extent silver as a plasmonic material. Unfortunately, a low plasma frequency (1.54 eV) reduces its utility in modern plasmonics applications. We also discuss, briefly, the effect of local fields on the optical properties of these materials., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables