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Intrinsic Negative Mass from Nonlinearity
F Di Mei1,2, P Caramazza1, D Pierangeli1
1Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma "La Sapienza," 00185 Rome, Italy.
Abstract:
We propose and provide experimental evidence of a mechanism able to support negative intrinsic effective mass. The idea is to use a shape-sensitive nonlinearity to change the sign of the mass in the leading linear propagation equation. Intrinsic negative-mass dynamics is reported for light beams in a ferroelectric crystal substrate, where the diffusive photorefractive nonlinearity leads to a negative-mass Schrödinger equation. The signature of inverted dynamics is the observation of beams repelled from strongly guiding integrated waveguides irrespective of wavelength and intensity and suggests shape-sensitive nonlinearity as a basic mechanism leading to intrinsic negative mass.
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