Motional narrowing refers to the striking phenomenon where the resonance line of a system coupled to a reservoir becomes narrower when increasing the reservoir fluctuation. A textbook example is found in nuclear magnetic resonance, where the fluctuating local magnetic fields created by randomly oriented nuclear spins are averaged when the motion of the nuclei is thermally activated. The existence of a motional narrowing effect in the optical response of semiconductor quantum dots remains so far unexplored. This effect may be important in this instance since the decoherence dynamics is a central issue for the implementation of quantum information processing based on quantum dots. Here we report on the experimental evidence of motional narrowing in the optical spectrum of a semiconductor quantum dot broadened by the spectral diffusion phenomenon. Surprisingly, motional narrowing is achieved when decreasing incident power or temperature, in contrast with the standard phenomenology observed for nuclear magnetic resonance.PACS numbers: 78.67. Hc, 78.55.Cr, In the seminal work on motional narrowing by Bloembergen et al., relaxation effects in nuclear magnetic resonance were beautifully explained by taking into account the influence of the thermal motion of the magnetic nuclei upon the spin-spin interaction [1]. The general treatment of relaxation processes for a system interacting with a reservoir was later formulated by Kubo in a stochastic theory that assumes random perturbations of the system by a fluctuating environment [2]. Depending on the relative magnitude of the spectral modulation amplitude and the inverse of the modulation correlation time, the relaxation dynamics is either in the slow modulation limit, where the optical line-shape reflects directly the statistical distribution of the different system energies, or in the fast modulation limit where the fluctuation is smoothed out and the line-shape is motionally narrowed into a Lorentzian profile. The relevance of motional narrowing for the description of relaxation phenomena has spread throughout many different fields, such as spin relaxation in semiconductors [3], vibrational dephasing in molecular physics [4], or phase noise in optical pumping [5].The optical spectrum of a material system with localized, zero-dimensional electronic states provides a generic example of the influence of a fluctuating environment on the coherence relaxation dynamics. In that case, the perturbing interactions induce a stochastic shift over time of the optical spectrum, resulting in the so-called spectral diffusion effect, which was observed for rare-earth ions [6], molecules [7], or semiconductor quantum dots [8,9]. In this latter system, impurities, defects or localized charges in the vicinity of a quantum dot induce micro-electric fields that shift the quantum dot emission line through the quantum confined Stark effect. The fluctuation of the quantum dot environment thus randomize the emission energy over a spectral range Σ on a characteristic time scale τ c . Spectral dif...

The structure of tumors can be recapitulated as an elastic frame formed by the connected cytoskeletons of the cells invaded by interstitial and intracellular fluids. The low-frequency mechanics of this poroelastic system, dictated by the elastic skeleton only, control tumor growth, penetration of therapeutic agents, and invasiveness. The high-frequency mechanical properties containing the additional contribution of the internal fluids have also been posited to participate in tumor progression and drug resistance, but they remain largely unexplored. Here we use Brillouin light scattering to produce label-free images of tumor microtissues based on the high-frequency viscoelastic modulus as a contrast mechanism. In this regime, we demonstrate that the modulus discriminates between tissues with altered tumorigenic properties. Our micrometric maps also reveal that the modulus is heterogeneously altered across the tissue by drug therapy, revealing a lag of efficacy in the core of the tumor. Exploiting high-frequency poromechanics should advance present theories based on viscoelasticity and lead to integrated descriptions of tumor response to drugs.

The acoustic vibrations of single monomers and dimers of gold nanoparticles were investigated by measuring for the first time their ultralow-frequency micro-Raman scattering. This experiment provides access not only to the frequency of the detected vibrational modes but also to their damping rate, which is obscured by inhomogeneous effects in measurements on ensembles of nano-objects. This allows a detailed analysis of the mechanical coupling occurring between two close nanoparticles (mediated by the polymer surrounding them) in the dimer case. Such coupling induces the hybridization of the vibrational modes of each nanoparticle, leading to the appearance in the Raman spectra of two ultralow-frequency modes corresponding to the out-of-phase longitudinal and transverse (with respect to the dimer axis) quasi-translations of the nanoparticles. Additionally, it is also shown to shift the frequency of the quadrupolar modes of the nanoparticles. Experimental results are interpreted using finite-element simulations, which enable the unambiguous identification of the detected modes and despite the simplifications made lead to a reasonable reproduction of their measured frequencies and quality factors. The demonstrated feasibility of low-frequency Raman scattering experiments on single nano-objects opens up new possibilities to improve the understanding of nanoscale vibrations with this technique being complementary with single nano-object time-resolved spectroscopy as it gives access to different vibrational modes.