Optical instabilities and spontaneous light emission by polarizable moving matter

Abstract

One of the most extraordinary manifestations of the coupling of the optical field and matter is the emission of light by charged particles passing through a dielectric medium: the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect. In this article, it is theoretically predicted that a related phenomenon may be observed when neutral fast polarizable particles travel near a metal surface supporting surface plasmon polaritons. Rather dramatically, it is found that at some critical velocity, even if the initial optical field is vanishingly small, the system may become unstable and may start spontaneously emitting light such that in some initial time window the optical field grows exponentially with time.