No Arabic abstract
Enhancing absorption in optically thin semiconductors is the key in the development of high-performance optical and optoelectronic devices. In this paper, we resort to the concept of degenerate critical coupling and design an ultra-thin semiconductor absorber composed of free-standing GaAs nanocylinder metasurfaces in the near infrared. The numerical results show that perfect absorption can be achieved through overlapping two Mie modes with opposite symmetry, with each mode contributing a theoretical maximum of 50% in their respective critical coupling state. The absorption also shows the polarization-independent and angle-insensitive robustness. This work, together with the design concept, opens up great opportunities for the realization of high-efficiency metasurface devices, including optical emitters, modulators, detectors, and sensors.
We propose a tunable coherent perfect absorber based on ultrathin nonlinear metasurfaces. The nonlinear metasurface is made of plasmonic nanoantennas coupled to an epsilon-near-zero material with a large optical nonlinearity. The coherent perfect absorption is achieved by controlling the relative phases of the input beams. We show that the optical response of the nonlinear metasurface can be tuned from a complete to a partial absorption by changing the intensity of the pump beam. The proposed nonlinear metasurface can be used to design optically tunable thermal emitters, modulators, and sensors.
Metasurfaces in metal/insulator/metal configuration have recently been widely used in photonics research, with applications ranging from perfect absorption to phase modulation, but why and when such structures can realize what kind of functionalities are not yet fully understood. Here, based on a coupled-mode theory analysis, we establish a complete phase diagram in which the optical properties of such systems are fully controlled by two simple parameters (i.e., the intrinsic and radiation losses), which are in turn dictated by the geometrical/material parameters of the underlying structures. Such a phase diagram can greatly facilitate the design of appropriate metasurfaces with tailored functionalities (e.g., perfect absorption, phase modulator, electric/magnetic reflector, etc.), demonstrated by our experiments and simulations in the Terahertz regime. In particular, our experiments show that, through appropriate structural/material tuning, the device can be switched across the functionality phase boundaries yielding dramatic changes in optical responses. Our discoveries lay a solid basis for realizing functional and tunable photonic devices with such structures.
Here we make use of vanadium dioxide (VO2) to design a bifunctional metasurface working at the same targeted frequency. With the increase of temperature, the functionality of the designed metasurface can switch from a multi-channel retroreflector to a perfect absorber, caused by the phase transition of VO2 from insulator to conductor. Different from traditional bifunctional metasurfaces designed by simple composition of two functionalities, our proposed bifunctional metasurface is based on the interaction between two functionalities. The device shows good potential for the combination of wavefront manipulation and optical absorption, therefore providing a promising approach for switchable detection and anti-detection devices.
We present a monolayer black phosphorus (BP)-based metamaterial structure for tunable anisotropic absorption in the mid-infrared. Based on the critical coupling mechanism of guided resonance, the structure realizes the high absorption efficiency of 99.65$%$ for TM polarization, while only 2.61$%$ at the same wavelength for TE polarization due to the intrinsic anisotropy of BP. The absorption characteristics can be flexibly controlled by changing critical coupling conditions, including the electron doping of BP, geometric parameters and incident angles of light. The results show feasibility in designing high-performance BP-based optoelectronic devices with spectral tunability and polarization selectivity.
Enhanced optical absorption in two-dimensional (2D) materials has recently moved into the focus of nanophotonics research. In this work, we present a gain-assisted method to achieve critical coupling and demonstrate the maximum absorption in undoped monolayer graphene in the near-infrared. In a two-port system composed of photonic crystal slab loaded with graphene, the gain medium is introduced to adjust the dissipative rate to match the radiation rate for the critical coupling, which is accessible without changing the original structural geometry. The appropriate tuning of the gain coefficient also enables the critical coupling absorption within a wide wavelength regime for different coupling configurations. This work provides a powerful guide to manipulate light-matter interaction in 2D materials and opens up a new path to design ultra-compact and high-performance 2D material optical devices.