image: This image shows emission spectra. An illustration of the different frequencies of light that can be emitted by an atom in a high energy state far away from graphene (top) or a few nanometers away from graphene doped with charge carriers (bottom). The emission spectra are based on a lithium atom initially excited from a 2s orbital to a 5f orbital and subsequently decaying into any unoccupied lower energy level. [For the continuous spectra, the colors represent the relative probability of emission at that frequency. For each transition, an orange line (or purple cloud) was placed if that transition is estimated to be faster than 1 per microsecond.]. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the July 15, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by N. River at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and colleagues was titled, "Shrinking light to allow forbidden transitions on the atomic scale." view more
Credit: Nicholas Rivera, Ido Kaminer, Bo Zhen, John Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljacic