No Arabic abstract
Plasmonic nanostructures hold promise for the realization of ultra-thin sub-wavelength devices, reducing power operating thresholds and enabling nonlinear optical functionality in metasurfaces. However, this promise is substantially undercut by absorption introduced by resistive losses, causing the metasurface community to turn away from plasmonics in favour of alternative material platforms (e.g., dielectrics) that provide weaker field enhancement, but more tolerable losses. Here, we report a plasmonic metasurface with a quality-factor (Q-factor) of 2340 in the telecommunication C band by exploiting surface lattice resonances (SLRs), exceeding the record by an order of magnitude. Additionally, we show that SLRs retain many of the same benefits as localized plasmonic resonances, such as field enhancement and strong confinement of light along the metal surface. Our results demonstrate that SLRs provide an exciting and unexplored method to tailor incident light fields, and could pave the way to flexible wavelength-scale devices for any optical resonating application.
We reveal that metasurfaces created by seemingly different lattices of (dielectric or metallic) meta-atoms with broken in-plane symmetry can support sharp high-$Q$ resonances that originate from the physics of bound states in the continuum. We prove rigorously a direct link between the bound states in the continuum and the Fano resonances, and develop a general theory of such metasurfaces, suggesting the way for smart engineering of resonances for many applications in nanophotonics and meta-optics.
Plasmonic lasers provide a paradigm-changing approach for the generation of coherent light at the nanoscale. In addition to the usual properties of coherent radiation, the emission of plasmonic lasers can feature high sensitivity to the surrounding environment, which makes this technology attractive for developing high-performance and highly-integrated sensing devices. Here, we investigate a plasmonic laser architecture based on a high-Q plasmonic crystal consisting of a periodic arrangement of nanoholes on a thin gold film cladded with an organic-dye-doped SiO$_2$ gain layer as the gain material. We report an extensive full-wave numerical analysis of the devices lasing performance and its application as a biochemical sensor, showing that the proposed design features excellent figures of merit for surface sensing that in principle can be over an order of magnitude larger than those of previously reported high-performance plasmonic biosensor architectures.
Nonlinear metasurfaces offer new paradigm for boosting optical effect beyond limitations of conventional materials. In this work, we present an alternative way to produce pronounced third-harmonic generation (THG) based on nonlinear field resonances rather than linear field enhancement, which is a typical strategy for achieving strong nonlinear response. By designing and studying a nonlinear plasmonic-graphene metasurface at terahertz regime with hybrid guided modes and bound states in the continuum modes, it is found that a THG with a narrow bandwidth can be observed, thanks to the strong resonance between generated weak THG field and these modes. Such strong nonlinear field resonance greatly enhances the photon-photon interactions, thus resulting in a large effective nonlinear coefficient of the whole system. This finding provides new opportunity for studying nonlinear optical metasurfaces.
We demonstrate the active tuning of all-dielectric metasurfaces exhibiting high-quality factor (high-Q) resonances. The active control is provided by embedding the asymmetric silicon meta-atoms with liquid crystals, which allows the relative index of refraction to be controlled through heating. It is found that high quality factor resonances ($Q=270pm30$) can be tuned over more than three resonance widths. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using all-dielectric metasurfaces to construct tunable narrow-band filters.
Due to their ability to confine light, optical resonators are of great importance to science and technology, yet their performances are often limited by out-of-plane scattering losses from inevitable fabrication imperfections. Here, we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a class of guided resonances in photonic crystal slabs, where out-of-plane scattering losses are strongly suppressed due to their topological nature. Specifically, these resonances arise when multiple bound states in the continuum - each carrying a topological charge - merge in the momentum space and enhance the quality factors of all resonances nearby. We experimentally achieve quality factors as high as $4.9times 10^5$ based on these resonances in the telecommunication regime, which is 12-times higher than ordinary designs. We further show this enhancement is robust across the samples we fabricated.Our work paves the way for future explorations of topological photonics in systems with open boundary condition and their applications in improving optoelectronic devices in photonic integrated circuits.