Vol 107, No 6 (2018)

A relativistic laser pulse, confined in a cylindrical-like target, under specific conditions may perform multiple scattering along the internal target surface. This results in the confinement of the laser light, leading to a very efficient interaction. The demonstrated propagation of the laser pulse along the curved surface is just yet another example of the “whispering gallery” effect, although nonideal due to laser–plasma coupling. In the relativistic domain its important feature is a gradual intensity decrease, leading to changes in the interaction conditions. The process may pronounce itself in plenty of physical phenomena, including very efficient electron acceleration and generation of relativistic magnetized plasma structures.

The physical reasons for observing the splitting of optical lines several orders of magnitude smaller than the spectral width of a laser pulse are investigated. A theory of coherent and incoherent photon echo (PE) in an external static magnetic field and in the presence of a pulsed magnetic field, which causes oscillations of the PE intensity, is elaborated. It is shown that the periods of oscillations in the echo intensity, the echo duration, and the dimensions of the regions in the inhomogeneous line, where the excited ions are coherent, do not depend on the degree of coherence of the laser pulse and on the external static magnetic field. As follows from the theory, in the case of the coherent excitation of the echo, the amplitude of the intensity oscillations is independent of the external static magnetic field if the inhomogeneous line is symmetric. It is shown that the amplitude of the oscillations at the incoherent excitation of the echo is equal to the autocorrelation function of the distribution function of the transition frequency along the inhomogeneous line with the argument equal to the Zeeman splitting of the optical line in the external magnetic field. In this case, the experimental values of the oscillation amplitude are in good agreement with the calculated values of the autocorrelation function for the total inhomogeneous line in LuLiF₄:Er³⁺ (⁴I_15/2⇒F_9/2 transition). In the same way, the autocorrelation function has been obtained for YLiF₄:Er³⁺ on the same transition.

The effect of external anisotropic strain on the infrared and visible luminescence spectra of SiGe/Si quantum well heterostructures at liquid helium temperatures is investigated for the first time. It is shown that, at a temperature of T = 5 K, the stretching of the SiGe layer along the [100] direction leads to an increase in the relative intensity of the visible luminescence by a factor of 7/3 ≃ 2.3. This effect is absent when the sample is stretched along the [110] direction. These observations are explained by considering “bright” and “dark” biexciton states involved in multiparticle recombination. At a temperature of 2 K, the relative intensity of the visible luminescence increases upon stretching by a factor of 3.4–3.9, which may indicate either the splitting of the ground states of biexcitons with different electron configurations or the deviation of their distribution function from the Boltzmann law.

We consider homogeneous time-like sections of a spacetime that correspond to Bianchi type-VIII model. For this model, we find a new class of regular solutions of vacuum Einstein’s equations, which describe a strong standing gravitational wave in a Universe, which is closed in some direction.

We show that an amplitude-modulated electromagnetic wave incident onto a liquid metacrystal (LMC) may cause parametric instability of meta-atoms’ mechanical oscillations. It results in either phase-coherent motion of the meta-atoms (leading to time-dependent components of LMC dielectric tensor) or chaotic isotropization of the medium that can be treated in terms of effective temperature. Both scenarios enable switching of the sign of certain components of permittivity tensor that, in turn, modifies the topology of isofrequency surface. Thus, the topological transition in LMC is expected to have an oscillatory or quasi-thermal character depending on the parameters, but in any case, the change of topology leads to dramatic changes of the medium properties, switching the LMC between the transparent and opaque states.

Recent ab initio studies of the role of magnetism in the decomposition of α-Fe–Cu alloy are analyzed. It is shown that the calculations based on effective pair potentials obtained earlier in the framework of the partial disordered-local moment model strongly overestimate the magnetic contribution. A simple model with the ab initio parametrization is formulated. It allows us to calculate the solubility limits for the bcc and fcc copper precipitates in α-Fe, which are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental data.

The structure of the adsorbed layer of alkali ions on the surface of colloidal silica solutions with a particle size of 27 nm has been studied by reflectometry and diffuse scattering of synchrotron radiation with a photon energy of about 71 keV. Electron density profiles in the direction perpendicular to the surface have been reconstructed from experimental data and spectra of the correlation function of heights in the surface plane have been obtained. The revealed deviation of the integral and frequency characteristics of the roughness spectra of the silica sol surface from predictions of the capillary-wave theory is of a fundamental character. This deviation is due to the contribution from roughnesses with low spatial frequencies ν < 10⁻⁴ nm^–1 and to the interference of diffuse scattering from different layer interfaces of the surface structure.

The paper was retracted on behalf of the authors in order to expand the list of authors and only publish conclusions commonly accepted by all of the authors. All of the authors have been informed of the retraction of the article and agree with it.