Detection of infrared (IR) photons in a room-temperature IR camera is carried out by a two-dimensional array of microbolometer pixels which exhibit temperature-sensitive resistivity. When IR light coming from the far-field is focused onto this array,
microbolometer pixels are heated up in proportion to the temperatures of the far-field objects. The resulting resistivity change of each pixel is measured via on-chip electronic readout circuit followed by analog to digital (A/D) conversion, image processing, and presentation of the final IR image on a separate information display screen. In this work, we introduce a new nanophotonic detector as a minimalist alternative to microbolometer such that the final IR image can be presented without using the components required for A/D conversion, image processing and display. In our design, the detector array is illuminated with visible laser light and the reflected light itself carries the IR image which can be directly viewed. We realize and numerically demonstrate this functionality using a resonant waveguide grating structure made of typical materials such as silicon carbide, silicon nitride, and silica for which lithography techniques are well-developed. We clarify the requirements to tackle the issues of fabrication nonuniformities and temperature drifts in the detector array. We envision a potential near-eye display device for IR vision based on timely use of diffractive optical waveguides in augmented reality headsets and tunable visible laser sources. Our work indicates a way to achieve direct thermal IR vision for suitable use cases with lower cost, smaller form factor, and reduced power consumption compared to the existing thermal IR cameras.
In passive linear systems, complete combining of powers carried by waves from several input channels into a single output channel is forbidden by the energy conservation law. Here, we demonstrate that complete combination of both coherent and incoher
ent plane waves can be achieved using metasurfaces with properties varying in space and time. The proposed structure reflects waves of the same frequency but incident at different angles towards a single direction. The frequencies of the output waves are shifted by the metasurface, ensuring perfect incoherent power combining. The proposed concept of power combining is general and can be applied for electromagnetic waves from the microwave to optical domains, as well as for waves of other physical nature.
The concept of synthetic dimensions in photonics has attracted rapidly growing interest in the past few years. Among a variety of photonic systems, the ring resonator system under dynamic modulation has been investigated in depth both in theory and e
xperiment, and has proven to be a powerful way to build synthetic frequency dimensions. In this tutorial, we start with a pedagogical introduction to the theoretical approaches in describing the dynamically modulated ring resonator system, and then review experimental methods in building such a system. Moreover, we discuss important physical phenomena in synthetic dimensions, including nontrivial topological physics. Our tutorial provides a pathway towards studying the dynamically modulated ring resonator system, understanding synthetic dimensions in photonics, and discusses future prospects for both fundamental research and practical applications using synthetic dimensions.
Second-order nonlinear effects, such as second-harmonic generation, can be strongly enhanced in nanofabricated photonic materials when both fundamental and harmonic frequencies are spatially and temporally confined. Practically designing low-volume a
nd doubly resonant nanoresonators in conventional semiconductor compounds is challenging owing to their intrinsic refractive index dispersion. In this work we review a recently developed strategy to design doubly resonant nanocavities with low mode volume and large quality factor by localized defects in a photonic crystal structure. We build on this approach by applying an evolutionary optimisation algorithm in connection with Maxwell equations solvers, showing that the proposed design recipe can be applied to any material platform. We explicitly calculate the second-harmonic generation efficiency for doubly resonant photonic crystal cavity designs in typical III-V semiconductor materials, such as GaN and AlGaAs, targeting a fundamental harmonic at telecom wavelengths, and fully accounting for the tensor nature of the respective nonlinear susceptibilities. These results may stimulate the realisation of small footprint photonic nanostructures in leading semiconductor material platforms to achieve unprecedented nonlinear efficiencies.
Bound states arise in waveguide QED systems with a strong frequency-dependence of the coupling between emitters and photonic modes. While exciting such bound-states with single photon wave-packets is not possible, photon-photon interactions mediated
by the emitters can be used to excite them with two-photon states. In this letter, we use scattering theory to provide upper limits on this excitation probability for a general non-Markovian waveguide QED system and show that this limit can be reached by a two-photon wave-packet with vanishing uncertainty in the total photon energy. Furthermore, we also analyze multi-emitter waveguide QED systems with multiple bound states and provide a systematic construction of two-photon wave-packets that can excite a given superposition of these bound states. As specific examples, we study bound state trapping in waveguide QED systems with single and multiple emitters and a time-delayed feedback.
Understanding dynamics of localized quantum systems embedded in engineered bosonic environments is a central problem in quantum optics and open quantum system theory. We present a formalism for studying few-particle scattering from a localized quantu
m system interacting with an bosonic bath described by an inhomogeneous wave-equation. In particular, we provide exact relationships between the quantum scattering matrix of this interacting system and frequency domain solutions of the inhomogeneous wave-equation thus providing access to the spatial distribution of the scattered few-particle wave-packet. The formalism developed in this paper paves the way to computationally understanding the impact of structured media on the scattering properties of localized quantum systems embedded in them without simplifying assumptions on the physics of the structured media.
We study the scattering of photons from periodically modulated quantum-optical systems. For excitation-number conserving quantum optical systems, we connect the analytic structure of the frequency-domain N-photon scattering matrix of the system to th
e Floquet decomposition of its effective Hamiltonian. Furthermore, it is shown that the first order contribution to the transmission or equal-time N-photon correlation spectrum with respect to the modulation frequency is completely geometric in nature i.e. it only depends on the Hamiltonian trajectory and not on the precise nature of the modulation being applied.
Conventional topological insulators support boundary states that have one dimension lower than the bulk system that hosts them, and these states are topologically protected due to quantized bulk dipole moments. Recently, higher-order topological insu
lators have been proposed as a way of realizing topological states that are two or more dimensions lower than the bulk, due to the quantization of bulk quadrupole or octupole moments. However, all these proposals as well as experimental realizations have been restricted to real-space dimensions. Here we construct photonic higher-order topological insulators (PHOTI) in synthetic dimensions. We show the emergence of a quadrupole PHOTI supporting topologically protected corner modes in an array of modulated photonic molecules with a synthetic frequency dimension, where each photonic molecule comprises two coupled rings. By changing the phase difference of the modulation between adjacently coupled photonic molecules, we predict a dynamical topological phase transition in the PHOTI. Furthermore, we show that the concept of synthetic dimensions can be exploited to realize even higher-order multipole moments such as a 4th order hexadecapole (16-pole) insulator, supporting 0D corner modes in a 4D hypercubic synthetic lattice that cannot be realized in real-space lattices.
Dielectric laser acceleration (DLA) represents a promising approach to building miniature particle accelerators on a chip. However, similar to conventional RF accelerators, an automatic and reconfigurable control mechanism is needed to scale DLA tech
nology towards high energy gains and practical applications. We present a system providing control of the laser coupling to DLA using integrated optics and introduce a novel component for power distribution using a reconfigurable mesh of Mach-Zehnder interferometers. We show how such a mesh may be sequentially and efficiently tuned to optimize power distribution in the circuit and find that this strategy has favorable scaling properties with respect to size of the mesh.
We demonstrate in this work that the use of metasurfaces provides a viable strategy to largely tune and enhance near-field radiative heat transfer between extended structures. In particular, using a rigorous coupled wave analysis, we predict that Si-
based metasurfaces featuring two-dimensional periodic arrays of holes can exhibit a room-temperature near-field radiative heat conductance much larger than any unstructured material to date. We show that this enhancement, which takes place in a broad range of separations, relies on the possibility to largely tune the properties of the surface plasmon polaritons that dominate the radiative heat transfer in the near-field regime.
