No Arabic abstract
While practical realizations of optical invisibility have been achieved so far by various ingenious methods, they generally rely on complex materials which prevent the wide implementation of such schemes. Here, we propose an alternative indivisibility procedure to design objects (i.e. self-cloaked structures) that have optical properties identical to the surrounding environment and are, thereby, intrinsically invisible to an external observer as such (without the necessity of an external cloak). The proposed method is based on the uncoupling of the scattered waves from the incident radiation by judiciously manipulating the scattering potential of a given object. We show that such a procedure is able to yield optical invisibility for any arbitrarily shaped object within any specified frequency bandwidth by simply employing isotropic non-magnetic dielectric materials, without the usage of loss or gain material. The validity of the design principle has been verified by direct experimental observations of the spatial electric field profiles and scattering patterns at the microwave regime. Our alternative self-cloaking strategy may have profound implications especially in noninvasive probing and cloaked sensor applications, where the wave penetrability into the sensor region is essential together with its invisibility to minimize the field distortion.
Nanophotonics is an important branch of modern optics dealing with light-matter interaction at the nanoscale. Nanoparticles can exhibit enhanced light absorption under illumination by light, and they become nanoscale sources of heat that can be precisely controlled and manipulated. For metal nanoparticles, such effects have been studied in the framework of $textit{thermoplasmonics}$ which, similar to plasmonics itself, has a number of limitations. Recently emerged $textit{all-dielectric resonant nanophotonics}$ is associated with optically-induced electric and magnetic Mie resonances, and this field is developing very rapidly in the last decade. As a result, thermoplasmonics is being replaced by $textit{all-dielectric thermonanophotonics}$ with many important applications such as photothermal cancer therapy, drug and gene delivery, nanochemistry, and photothermal imaging. This review paper aims to introduce this new field of non-plasmonic nanophotonics and discuss associated thermally-induced processes at the nanoscale.
In this article, a 2D plasmonic waveguide loaded with all dielectric anisotropic metamaterial, consisting of alternative layers of Si-SiO2, has been theoretically proposed and numerically analyzed. Main characteristics of waveguide i.e. propagation constant, propagation length and normalized mode area have been calculated for different values of ridge width and height at telecommunication wavelength. The respective 1D structure of the waveguide has been analytically solved for the anisotropic ridge as a single uniaxial medium with dielectric tensor defined by Effective Medium Theory (EMT). The 2D structure has been analyzed numerically through FEM simulation using Mode analysis module in Comsol Multiphysics. Both the EMT and real multilayer structure have been considered in numerical simulations. Such structure with all dielectric metamaterial provides an extra degree of freedom namely fill factor, fraction of Si layer in a Si-SiO2 unit cell, to tune the propagation characteristics compared to the conventional DLSSP waveguide. A wide range of variations in all the characteristics have been observed for different fill factor values. Besides, the effect of the first interface layer has also been considered. Though all dielectric metamaterial has already been utilized in photonic waveguide as cladding, the implementation in plasmonic waveguide has not been investigated yet to our best knowledge. The proposed device might be a potential in deep sub-wavelength optics, PIC and optoelectronics.
Micro-sized spheres can focus light into subwavelength spatial domains: a phenomena called photonic nanojet. Even though well studied in three-dimensional (3D) configurations, only a few attempts have been reported to observe similar phenomena in two-dimensional (2D) systems. This, however, is important to take advantage of photonic nanojets in integrated optical systems. Usually, surface plasmon polaritons are suggested for this purpose, but they suffer notoriously from the rather low propagation lengths due to intrinsic absorption. Here, we solve this problem and explore, theoretically, numerically, and experimentally, the use of Bloch surface waves sustained by a suitably structured all-dielectric media to enable subwavelength focusing in an integrated planar optical system. Since only a low index contrast can be achieved while relying on Bloch surface waves, we perceive a new functional element that allows a tight focusing and the observation of a photonic nanojet on top of the surface. We experimentally demonstrate a spot size of 0.66{lambda} in the effective medium. Our approach paves the way to 2D all-dielectric photonic chips for nano-particle manipulation in fluidic devices and sensing applications.
Active metasurfaces, whose optical properties can be modulated post-fabrication, have emerged as an intensively explored field in recent years. The efforts to date, however, still face major performance limitations in tuning range, optical quality, and efficiency especially for non mechanical actuation mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce an active metasurface platform combining phase tuning covering the full 2$pi$ range and diffraction-limited performance using an all-dielectric, low-loss architecture based on optical phase change materials (O-PCMs). We present a generic design principle enabling switching of metasurfaces between two arbitrary phase profiles and propose a new figure-of-merit (FOM) tailored for active meta-optics. We implement the approach to realize a high-performance varifocal metalens operating at 5.2 $mu$m wavelength. The metalens is constructed using Ge2Sb2Se4Te1 (GSST), an O-PCM with a large refractive index contrast ($Delta$ n > 1) and unique broadband low-loss characteristics in both amorphous and crystalline states. The reconfigurable metalens features focusing efficiencies above 20% at both states for linearly polarized light and a record large switching contrast ratio of 29.5 dB. We further validated aberration-free imaging using the metalens at both optical states, which represents the first experimental demonstration of a non-mechanical active metalens with diffraction-limited performance.
The recent observation of high-harmonic generation from solids creates a new possibility for engineering fundamental strong-field processes by patterning the solid target with subwavelength nanostructures. All-dielectric metasurfaces exhibit high damage thresholds and strong enhancement of the driving field, making them attractive platforms to control high-harmonics and other high-field processes at nanoscales. Here we report enhanced non-perturbative high-harmonic emission from a Si metasurface that possesses a sharp Fano resonance resulting from a classical analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency. Harmonic emission is enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude compared to unpatterned samples. The enhanced high harmonics are highly anisotropic with excitation polarization and are selective to excitation wavelength due to its resonant feature. By combining nanofabrication technology and ultrafast strong-field physics, our work paves the way for designing new compact ultrafast photonic devices that operate under high intensities and short wavelengths.