Reversed Doppler effect in photonic crystals
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Updated: Aug 13, 2026

Fabrication And Characterization Of Photonic Crystal Slow Light Waveguides And Cavities
Published on: November 30, 2012
Evan J Reed1, Marin Soljacić, John D Joannopoulos
1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. evan@mit.edu
Abstract:
Nonrelativistic reversed Doppler shifts have never been observed in nature and have only been speculated to occur in pathological systems with simultaneously negative effective permittivity and permeability. This Letter presents a different, new physical phenomenon that leads to a nonrelativistic reversed Doppler shift in light. It arises when light is reflected from a moving shock wave propagating through a photonic crystal. In addition to reflection of a single frequency, multiple discrete reflected frequencies or a 10 GHz periodic modulation can also be observed when a single carrier frequency of wavelength 1 microm is incident.
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