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Register a new userElectromagnetic confinement via spin-orbit interaction in anisotropic dielectrics
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Added by
Alessandro Alberucci
Publication date
2016
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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We investigate electromagnetic propagation in uniaxial dielectrics with a transversely varying orientation of the optic axis, the latter staying orthogonal everywhere to the propagation direction. In such a geometry, the field experiences no refractive index gradients, yet it acquires a transversely-modulated Pancharatnam-Berry phase, that is, a geometric phase originating from a spin-orbit interaction. We show that the periodic evolution of the geometric phase versus propagation gives rise to a longitudinally-invariant effective potential. In certain configurations, this geometric phase can provide transverse confinement and waveguiding. The theoretical findings are tested and validated against numerical simulations of the complete Maxwells equations. Our results introduce and illustrate the role of geometric phases on electromagnetic propagation over distances well exceeding the diffraction length, paving the way to a whole new family of guided waves and waveguides which do not rely on refractive index tailoring.
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Optical nanocavities confine and store light, which is essential to increase the interaction between photons and electrons in semiconductor devices, enabling, e.g., lasers and emerging quantum technologies. While temporal confinement has improved by orders of magnitude over the past decades, spatial confinement inside dielectrics was until recently believed to be bounded at the diffraction limit. The conception of dielectric bowtie cavities (DBCs) shows a path to photon confinement inside semiconductors with mode volumes bound only by the constraints of materials and nanofabrication, but theory was so far misguided by inconsistent definitions of the mode volume and experimental progress has been impeded by steep nanofabrication requirements. Here we demonstrate nanometer-scale photon confinement inside 8 nm silicon DBCs with an aspect ratio of 30, inversely designed by fabrication-constrained topology optimization. Our cavities are defined within a compact device footprint of $4lambda^2$ and exhibit mode volumes down to $V=3 times 10^{-4} lambda^3$ with wavelengths in the $lambda=1550$ nm telecom band. This corresponds to field localization deep below the diffraction limit in a single hotspot inside the dielectric. A crucial insight underpinning our work is the identification of the critical role of lightning-rod effects at the surface. They invalidate the common definition of the mode volume, which is prone to gauge meretricious surface effects or numerical artefacts rather than robust confinement inside the dielectric. We use near-field optical measurements to corroborate the photon confinement to a single nanometer-scale hotspot. Our work enables new CMOS-compatible device concepts ranging from few- and single-photon nonlinearities over electronics-photonics integration to biosensing.
Optical isolation enables nonreciprocal manipulations of light with broad applications in optical communications. Optical isolation by rotating structures has drawn considerable attention due to its magnetic-free nature and unprecedented performance. Conventional rotation-based optical isolation relies on the use of bulky cavities hindering applications in subwavelength photonics. Here, we propose a novel mechanism of optical isolation by integrating the unique dispersion of a hyperbolic metamaterial with the transverse spin-orbit interaction of evanescent waves. We show that rotation of a subwavelength hyperbolic nanoparticle breaks the time-reversal symmetry and yields two resonant chiral modes that selectively couple to the transverse spin of waveguide modes. Remarkably, the transverse spin-orbit interaction can give rise to unidirectional coupling and $>95%$ isolation of infrared light at an experimentally feasible rotation speed. Our work fuses the two important fields of optical isolation and photonic spin-orbit interactions, leading to magnetic-free yet compact nonreciprocal devices for novel applications in optical communications, chiral quantum optics, and topological photonics.
We develop a novel theoretical framework describing polariton-enhanced spin-orbit interaction of light on the surface of two-dimensional media. Starting from the integral formulation of electromagnetic scattering, we exploit the reduced dimensionality of the system to introduce a quantum-like formalism particularly suitable to fully take advantage of rotational invariance. Our description is closely related to that of a fictitious spin one quantum particle living in the atomically thin medium, whose orbital, spin and total angular momenta play a key role in the scattering process. Conservation of total angular momentum upon scattering enables to physically unveil the interaction between radiation and the two-dimensional material along with the detailed exchange processes among orbital and spin components. In addition, we specialize our model to doped extended graphene, finding such spin-orbit interaction to be dramatically enhanced by the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons propagating radially along the graphene sheet. We provide several examples of the enormous possibilities offered by plasmon-enhanced spin-orbit interaction of light including vortex generation, mixing, and engineering of tunable deep subwavelength arrays of optical traps in the near field. Our results hold great potential for the development of nano-scaled quantum active elements and logic gates for the manipulation of hyper-entangled photon states as well as for the design of artificial media imprinted by engineered photonic lattices tweezing cold atoms into the desired patterns.
Recently, spatiotemporal optical vortex pulses carrying a purely transverse intrinsic orbital angular momentum were generated experimentally [{it Optica} {bf 6}, 1547 (2019); {it Nat. Photon.} {bf 14}, 350 (2020)]. However, an accurate theoretical analysis of such states and their angular-momentum properties remains elusive. Here we provide such analysis, including scalar and vector spatiotemporal Bessel-type solutions as well as descrption of their propagational, polarization, and angular-momentum properties. Most importantly, we calculate both local densities and integral values of the spin and orbital angular momenta, and predict observable spin-orbit interaction phenomena related to the coupling between the trasnverse spin and orbital angular momentum. Our analysis is readily extended to spatiotemporal vortex pulses of other natures (e.g., acoustic).
We show theoretically that conversion between spin and charge by spin-orbit interaction in metals occurs even in a non-local setup where magnetization and spin-orbit interaction are spatially separated if electron diffusion is taken into account. Calculation is carried out for the Rashba spin-orbit interaction treating the coupling with a ferromagnet perturbatively. The results indicate the validity of the concept of effective spin gauge field (spin motive force) in the non-local configuration. The inverse Rashba-Edelstein effect observed for a trilayer of a ferromagnet, a normal metal and a heavy metal can be explained in terms of the non-local effective spin gauge field.
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