Demonstration of Broadband Non-Resonant Time-Crystal Amplification in Microwaves
- 1Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering , Purdue University , West Lafayette , IN , USA
- 2Department of Physics , Technion-Israel Institute of Technology , Haifa , Israel
Abstract
We report an optically modulated experimental realization of a photonic time crystal (PTC) in the microwave regime, demonstrating for the first time that the PTC exponential growth can overcome losses and finite-size constraints of a practical spatio-temporal system and yield stable positive terminal gain over a continuous broadband frequency range. The developed experimental platform is a purely time-modulated capacitor (TMC) microwave circuit based on a microstrip transmission line, in which synchronized optical modulation of reverse-biased photodiodes generates strong (94.5 %) temporal modulation of the effective capacitance at 200 MHz. Broadband amplification consistent with a momentum band gap (MBG), a defining signature of photonic time-crystal physics, is observed, with a peak gain of 3.8 dB over a 65 MHz bandwidth. In addition, a narrow parametric resonance appears at the center of the band gap, reaching 4.8 dB. This sharp peak is associated with the spatial inhomogeneities of the lumped-element realization, while the corresponding homogeneous distributed system retains the Floquet-mode structure of a photonic time crystal. We show that finite microwave TMC implementations inherit the defining physics of PTCs, including phase-invariant non-resonant amplification and slow-light behavior inside the momentum band gap, while finite-size and loss mechanisms transform the ideal semicircular PTC gain profile into a continuous asymmetric non-Lorentzian gain band characterized by a Pearson type IV distribution.
Related
- Broadband Visible Emission from a Rigid Ground State in an Ionic Zn-MOF Single Crystal
- Broadband near-infrared emission in Tm3+-doped high-entropy (Lu,Y,Sc,Gd)2O3 crystal fibers grown by LHPG
- Machine Learning and Corona Effect Coupling, a New Tool for Water Quality Control: Highlighting the Impact of Microwaves on Water Samples
- Demonstration of Ultraviolet Photodissociation Induced by Light-Emitting Diodes Externally Interfaced to a Linear Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer
- A simple demonstration of the importance of purity in nanotechnology with the example of rapid syntheses of gold nanoparticles in water
BibTeX
@misc{jones2026demonstration,
title = {{Demonstration of Broadband Non-Resonant Time-Crystal Amplification in Microwaves}},
author = {Thomas R. Jones and Ludmila J. Prokopeva and Alexander V. Kildishev and Mordechai Segev and Dimitrios Peroulis},
howpublished = {arXiv (Cornell University)},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.21014},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21014},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Demonstration of Broadband Non-Resonant Time-Crystal Amplification in Microwaves
AU - Thomas R. Jones
AU - Ludmila J. Prokopeva
AU - Alexander V. Kildishev
AU - Mordechai Segev
AU - Dimitrios Peroulis
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/20
PB - arXiv (Cornell University)
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.21014
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21014
AB - We report an optically modulated experimental realization of a photonic time crystal (PTC) in the microwave regime, demonstrating for the first time that the PTC exponential growth can overcome losses and finite-size constraints of a practical spatio-temporal system and yield stable positive terminal gain over a continuous broadband frequency range. The developed experimental platform is a purely time-modulated capacitor (TMC) microwave circuit based on a microstrip transmission line, in which synchronized optical modulation of reverse-biased photodiodes generates strong (94.5 %) temporal modulation of the effective capacitance at 200 MHz. Broadband amplification consistent with a momentum band gap (MBG), a defining signature of photonic time-crystal physics, is observed, with a peak gain of 3.8 dB over a 65 MHz bandwidth. In addition, a narrow parametric resonance appears at the center of the band gap, reaching 4.8 dB. This sharp peak is associated with the spatial inhomogeneities of the lumped-element realization, while the corresponding homogeneous distributed system retains the Floquet-mode structure of a photonic time crystal. We show that finite microwave TMC implementations inherit the defining physics of PTCs, including phase-invariant non-resonant amplification and slow-light behavior inside the momentum band gap, while finite-size and loss mechanisms transform the ideal semicircular PTC gain profile into a continuous asymmetric non-Lorentzian gain band characterized by a Pearson type IV distribution.
SN - 2331-8422
ER -