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Gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor wires have emerged as potent candidates for nonlinear optical devices, necessitating bandgap engineering for an expanded operational wavelength range. We report the successful growth of strain-mediated GaAs microwires (MWs) with an average diameter of 1.1 mu m. The axial tensile strain in these wires, as measured by X-ray diffraction and Raman scattering, ranges from 1.61 % to 1.95 % and from 1.44 % to 2.03 %, respectively. This strain condition significantly reduces the bandgap of GaAs MWs compared to bulk GaAs, enabling a response wavelength extension up to 1.1 mu m. Open aperture Z-scan measurements reveal a nonlinear absorption coefficient of -15.9 cm/MW and a third-order magnetic susceptibility of -2.8 x 10(-8) esu at 800 nm for these MWs. I-scan measurements further show that the GaAs saturable absorber has a modulation depth of 7.9 % and a nonsaturation loss of 3.3 % at 1050 nm. In laser applications, GaAs MWs have been effectively used as saturable absorbers for achieving Q-switched and dual-wavelength synchronous mode-locking operations in Yb-bulk lasers. These results not only offer new insights into the use of large diameter semiconductor wires but also expand the potential for applications requiring bandgap tuning.

Metasurfaces have recently opened up applications in the quantum regime, including quantum tomography and the generation of quantum entangled states. With their capability to store a vast amount of information by utilizing the various geometric degrees of freedom of nanostructures, metasurfaces are expected to be useful for processing quantum information. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a programmable metasurface capable of performing quantum algorithms using both classical and quantum light with single photons. Our approach encodes multiple programmable quantum algorithms and operations, such as Grover's search algorithm and the quantum Fourier transform, onto the same metalens array on a metasurface. A spatial light modulator selectively excites different sets of metalenses to carry out the quantum algorithms, while the interference patterns captured by a single-photon camera are used to extract information about the output state at the selected output directions. Our programmable quantum metasurface approach holds promising potential as a cost-effective means of miniaturizing components for quantum computing and information processing.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a programmable matrix computation in the optical domain using a spatial light modulator (SLM) and a metalens array. Our scheme encodes the programmable matrix to the metalens array by superimposing multiple phase gradients. Meanwhile, the SLM produces a phase-controlled spatial illuminated light which acts as our phase-controlled spatial illuminated light which acts as our input vector. Then, the result can be extracted from the far-field interference pattern constructed by different metalenses using a pattern recognition method. © 2023, META Conference. All rights reserved.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a scheme to remotely and continuously control the vortex beam structure using polarization-entangled photon pairs together with a metasurface. With a heralding technique adopted, the spin-orbit coupling provided by the metasurface translates to a tailor-made entanglement of the orbital angular momentum and the polarization of the signal photon. Then, the polarization of the heralding photon is used to remotely control the vortex structure of the signal photon, directly manifested as a continuous orbital rotation. © 2023, META Conference. All rights reserved.

Metasurfaces utilize engineered nanostructures to achieve control on all possible dimensions of light, encouraging versatile applications, including beam steering, multifunctional lensing, and multiplexed holograms. Towards the quantum optical regime for metasurfaces, although significant efforts have been put into generating and analyzing specific quantum states, control schemes to further manipulate these quantum states or information are still limited. Here, based on a metasurface, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a continuous heralding scheme to remotely control a vortex beam with high robustness to noise using polarization-entangled photon pairs. Our metasurface entangles polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) and the polarization selection on heralding photon erases the which-OAM information on signal photon. It induces an interference of two different OAM states remotely, manifesting a continuous orbital rotation. Our results show that metasurfaces have potential applications in quantum communication and information processing in entangling information with increasing complexity in the content.

Photothermal phenomenon is one of the natural responses in light-matter interactions in which the energy of the incident light is converted into heat, resulting in a temperature increase in the illuminated material. This effect has a direct influence on the refractive index of the material such that its change of spectral dependency with temperature can be exploited for different applications. However, it is also important to separate/identify the thermal effect from the optical/electronic resonance effect to expand potential applications of light-matter interactions. In this work, we demonstrate the use of a white-light interferometry approach combined with a windowed Fourier transform method and a consistency-checking peak-fitting method to obtain the refractive index of an Rh6G-ethanol dye solution with a sensitivity of about ∼10-6 (RIU) for the visible range. Moreover, we also perform both static and dynamic measurements to study the photothermal effect of the Rh6G solution under external excitation. Importantly, we separate the optical and thermal effects due to the external excitation and obtain very good agreement with the experimental results by modeling the relative refractive index of the Rh6G solution with an expression consisting of spectrally a Fano-like resonance term and a linear dependent thermal term. We find that the response due to the optical effect is about ∼0.2 × 10-3 of that due to the thermal effect in the low-light regime. Our approach to separating the optical and thermal effects could shed light on other fields for potential applications through precision measurements of the transmission phase or refractive index. © 2023 Optica Publishing Group.

Two-photon interference is an important effect that is tightly related to the quantum nature of light. Recently, it has been shown that the photon bunching from the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect can be used for quantum imaging in which sample properties (reflection/transmission amplitude, phase delay, or polarization) can be characterized at the pixel-by-pixel level. In this work, we perform Jones matrix imaging for an unknown object based on two-photon interference. By using a reference metasurface with panels of known polarization responses in pairwise coincidence measurements, the object's polarization responses at each pixel can be retrieved from the dependence of the coincidence visibility as a function of the reference polarization. The post-selection of coincidence images with specific reference polarization in our approach eliminates the need in switching the incident polarization and thus parallelized optical measurements for Jones matrix characterization. The parallelization in preparing input states, prevalent in any quantum algorithms, is an advantage of adopting two-photon interference in Jones matrix imaging. We believe our work points to the usage of metasurfaces in biological and medical imaging in the quantum optical regime.

Space−time modulated metamaterials support extraordinary rich applications, such as parametric amplification, frequency conversion, and non-reciprocal transmission. The non-Hermitian space−time varying systems combining non-Hermiticity and space−time varying capability, have been proposed to realize wave control like unidirectional amplification, while its experimental realization still remains a challenge. Here, based on metamaterials with software-defined impulse responses, we experimentally demonstrate non-Hermitian space−time varying metamaterials in which the material gain and loss can be dynamically controlled and balanced in the time domain instead of spatial domain, allowing us to suppress scattering at the incident frequency and to increase the efficiency of frequency conversion at the same time. An additional modulation phase delay between different meta-atoms results in unidirectional amplification in frequency conversion. The realization of non-Hermitian space−time varying metamaterials will offer further opportunities in studying non-Hermitian topological physics in dynamic and nonreciprocal systems. © 2022, The Author(s).

Metasurfaces provide a promising route for structuring light and generating holograms with designed amplitude, phase, and polarization profiles, leading to a versatile platform for integrating and constructing optical components beyond the conventional ones. At the same time, incorporating coincidence in imaging allows a high signal-to-noise ratio for imaging in very low light levels. As beneficial from the recent development in both metasurfaces and single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras, we combine the polarization-sensitive capability of metasurfaces with Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM)-type interference in generating images with tailor-made two-photon interference and polarization coincidence signatures. By using orthogonal linear-polarized photons as incidence, correlated, anticorrelated, and uncorrelated polarization coincidence features can be observed within the same image from the pairwise second-order coherence statistics across different pixels of the image. Our work adds polarization to the demonstrated amplitude and phase sensitivity in the domain of “HOM microscopy” and can be useful for biological and security applications.

Metasurfaces with ultrathin artificial structures have attracted much attention because of their unprecedented capability in light manipulations. The recent development of metasurfaces with controllable responses opens up new opportunities in various applications. Moreover, metasurfaces composed of twisted chiral structures can generate asymmetric responses for opposite incidence, leading to more degrees of freedom in wave detections and controls. However, most past studies had focused on the amplitude responses, not to mention using bi-directional phase responses, in the characterization and light manipulation of chiral metasurfaces. Here, we report a birefringent interference approach to achieve a controllable asymmetric bi-directional transmission phase from planar chiral metasurface by tuning the orientation of the metasurface with respect to the optical axis of an add-on birefringent substrate. To demonstrate our approach, we fabricate planar Au sawtooth nanoarray metasurface and measure the asymmetric transmission phase of the metasurface placed on a birefringent sapphire crystal slab. The Au sawtooth metasurface-sapphire system exhibits large oscillatory behavior for the asymmetric transmission phase with the tuning parameter. We confirm our experimental results by Jones matrix calculations using data obtained from full-wave simulations for the metasurface. Our approach in the characterization and light manipulation of metasurfaces with controllable responses is simple and nondestructive, enabling new functionalities and potential applications in optical communication, imaging, and remote sensing.

Based on the transfer-matrix method (TMM), we report the characteristics of the interface states in one-dimensional (1D) composite structures consisting of two photonic crystals (PCs) composed of binary dielectrics A and B, with unit-cell configurations ABA (PC I) and BAB (PC II). The dependence of the interface states on the number of unit cells N and the boundary factor x are displayed. It is verified that the interface states are independent of N when the PC has inversion symmetry (x = 0.5). Besides, the composite structures support the formation of interface states independent of the PC symmetry, except that the positions of the interface states will be varied within the photonic band gaps. Moreover, the robustness of the interface states against nonuniformities is investigated by adding Gaussian noise to the layer thickness. In the case of inversion symmetry (x = 0.5) the most robust interface states are achieved, while for the other cases (x ≠ 0.5) interface states decay linearly with position inside the band gap. This work could shed light on the development of robust photonic devices. © 2022 Current Optics and Photonics.

We demonstrate extraction of spatially dependent material parameters by using unsupervised neural network in learning the data structure of the wave propagating data from a given wave equation. A 2D spring mass model is used to image mass or modulus distribution, as a simplified model for acoustic imaging. The approach facilitates the discovery of spatially dependent differential equation coefficients and can be applied to different waves, without prior knowledge of scattering mechanism and is applicable to inverse scattering with metamaterials. © 2023, META Conference. All rights reserved.

By using orthogonal linear-polarized photons, images with tailor-made second-order coherence signatures are generated as “coincidence images” from metasurfaces. The metasurfaces provide arbitrary control on the coincidence signal (correlated, anticorrelated, or uncorrelated photons) at different locations either on the metasurface or the focal plane of the metasurface. The ability to generate polarization coincidence images from metasurfaces is potentially useful for setting up quantum imaging schemes. © 2023, META Conference. All rights reserved.

Qubit operation belonging to unitary transformation is the fundamental operation to realize quantum computing and information processing. Here, we show that the complex and flexible light-matter interaction between dielectric metasurfaces and incident light can be used to perform arbitrary U(2) operations. By incorporating both coherent spatial-mode operation together with two polarizations on a single metasurface, we further extend the discussion to single-photon two-qubit U(4) operations. We believe the efficient usage of metasurfaces as a potential compact platform can simplify optical qubit operation from bulky systems into conceptually subwavelength elements.

Metasurfaces with ultrathin artificial structures have attracted much attention because of their unprecedented capability in light manipulations. The recent development of metasurfaces with controllable responses opens up new opportunities in various applications. Moreover, metasurfaces composed of twisted chiral structures can generate asymmetric responses for opposite incidence, leading to more degrees of freedom in wave detections and controls. However, most past studies had focused on the amplitude responses, not to mention using bi-directional phase responses, in the characterization and light manipulation of chiral metasurfaces. Here, we report a birefringent interference approach to achieve a controllable asymmetric bi-directional transmission phase from planar chiral metasurface by tuning the orientation of the metasurface with respect to the optical axis of an add-on birefringent substrate. To demonstrate our approach, we fabricate planar Au sawtooth nanoarray metasurface and measure the asymmetric transmission phase of the metasurface placed on a birefringent sapphire crystal slab. The Au sawtooth metasurface-sapphire system exhibits large oscillatory behavior for the asymmetric transmission phase with the tuning parameter. We confirm our experimental results by Jones matrix calculations using data obtained from full-wave simulations for the metasurface. Our approach in the characterization and light manipulation of metasurfaces with controllable responses is simple and nondestructive, enabling new functionalities and potential applications in optical communication, imaging, and remote sensing. © 2021 Ranran Zhang et al., published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2021.

We approach the inverse problem of imaging as a task of automated feature learning of the underlying wave equation. While feature extraction with unsupervised machine learning is widely used in analyzing complex data on clustering, classification, and visualization, we show its direct usage on discovering interpretable physical concepts and then obtaining images from wave-propagation data. By using a spring-mass lattice as a simplified model in acoustic imaging, a variational autoencoder is trained to extract features that govern the dynamics of wave propagation from configurations with uncorrelated random material parameters. The extracted features are transformed to images of spring constants and masses by an additional linear regression. The current scheme of extraction-based inverse imaging of features is robust against noise in wave-propagation data and incomplete accessibility in the case of inverse scattering in practice. Our approach requires minimal prior knowledge of the wave-scattering mechanism with applications from the extraction of physical constants and defect detection to discovering physical phenomena.

We propose the concept of one-sided destructive quantum interference based on lossy metasurfaces. It corresponds to one-sided beam splitting with 50:25:0 in percentage ratio among the transmission and the two reflection efficiencies, which can be realized by a metasurface with unidirectional zero reflection (UZR) from a non-Hermitian exceptional point. When two identical photons enter both sides of the lossy metasurface, quantum interference only occurs for the single-photon output state towards one side but not the other due to UZR. Such one-sided quantum interference can be further made totally destructive. This effect along with UZR provides more degrees of freedom in quantum interference control and entangled states construction.

We investigate how quantum interference can be controlled by using bianisotropic metasurfaces. By considering a bianisotropic metasurface with material loss from metal, we numerically demonstrate an asymmetric control of quantuminterference with an origin from an exceptional point of the metasurface in the classical regime. © 2021 META Conference. All rights reserved.