Search

Parity of particle number is a new degree of freedom for manipulating metasurface, while its influence on controlling non-local metasurfaces remains an unresolved and intriguing question. We propose a metasurface consisting of periodically arranged infinite-long cylinders made from multiple layers of SiO2 and WS2. The cylinder exhibits strong backward scattering due to the overlapping magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole resonances. Without non-local coupling in unit cells, the infinite-size metasurface manifests high reflection across all instances. However, parity-dependent reflectivity diverges with non-local coupling in supercells, exhibiting either increased logarithmic or decreased exponential behavior, with significant distinctions at small particle numbers. Interestingly, equal magnitude reflection and transmission reversals are achievable through alternation between adjacent odd and even particle numbers. The finite-size non-local metasurfaces behave similarly to the infinite-size counterparts, yet high reflection disappears at small particle numbers due to energy leakage. Essentially, high reflection arises from strong backward scattering and effective suppression of lateral multiple scatterings. Our work aids in the actual metasurface design and sheds new light on photonic integrated circuits and on-chip optical communication., Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures

High-contrast refractive indexes are pivotal in dielectric metasurfaces for inducing various exotic phenomena, such as the bound state in the continuum (BIC) and electric mirror (EM). However, the limitations of high-index materials are adverse to the practical applications, thus low-contrast metasurfaces with comparable performance are highly desired. Here we present a low-contrast dielectric metasurface comprising radially anisotropic cylinders, which are SiO2 cylinders doped with a small amount of WS2. The cylinder exhibits unidirectional forward superscattering originating from the overlapping of the electric and magnetic dipole resonances. When normal illumination by a near-infrared plane wave, the metasurface consisting of the superscattering constituents manifests a polarization-insensitive EM. Conversely, when subjected to an in-plane incoming wave, the metasurface generates a symmetry-protected BIC characterized by an ultrahigh Q factor and nearly negligible out-of-plane energy radiation. Our work highlights the doping approach as an efficient strategy for designing low-contrast functional metasurfaces and sheds new light on the potential applications in photonic integrated circuits and on-chip optical communication.

Metasurfaces that can work without the rigorous periodic arrangement of meta-atoms are highly desired by practical optical micro-nano devices. In this work, we proposed two kinds of Kerker-type metasurfaces possessing positional disorder immunity. The metasurfaces are composed of two different core-shell cylinders satisfying the first and second Kerker conditions, respectively. Even with large positional disorder perturbation of the meta-atoms, the metasurfaces can still maintain the same excellent performances as periodic ones, such as the total transmission and magnetic mirror responses. This disorder immunity is due to the unidirectional forward and backward scatterings of a single core-shell cylinder leading to very weak lateral couplings between neighboring cylinders thus rarely affecting the multiple scatterings in the forward or backward direction. In contrast, the dominant response of the disordered non-Kerker-type metasurface decreases significantly. Our findings provide a new idea for designing robust metasurfaces and extend the scope of metasurface applications in sensing and communication under complex practical circumstances., Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures

Ultrafast sub-ps THz pulse conveys rich distinctive spectral fingerprints related to the vibrational or rotational modes of biomolecules and can be used to resolve the time-dependent dynamics of the motions. Thus, an efficient platform for enhancing the THz light-matter interaction is strongly demanded. Waveguides, owing to their tightly spatial confinement of the electromagnetic fields and the longer interaction distance, are promising platforms. However, the efficient feeding of the sub-ps THz pulse to the waveguides remains challenging due to the ultra-wide bandwidth property of the ultrafast signal. We propose a sensing chip comprised of a pair of back-to-back Vivaldi antennas and a 90{\deg} bent slotline waveguide to overcome the challenge. The effective operating bandwidth of the sensing chip ranges from 0.2 to 1.15 THz, with the free-space to chip coupling efficiency up to 50%. Over the entire band, the THz signal is 42.44 dB above the noise level with a peak of 73.40 dB. To take advantages of the efficient sensing chip, we have measured the characteristic fingerprint of {\alpha}-lactose monohydrate, and a sharp absorption dip at near 0.53 THz has been successfully observed demonstrating the accuracy of the proposed solution. The proposed sensing chip has the advantages of efficient in-plane coupling, ultra-wide bandwidth, easy integration and fabrication, large-scale manufacturing capability, and cost-effective, and can be a strong candidate for THz light-matter interaction platform., Comment: Corresponding authors: Binbin Hong's E-mail: b.hong@szu.edu.cn; Guo Ping Wang's E-mail: gpwang@szu.edu.cn

The rapidly growing global data usage has demanded more efficient ways to utilize the scarce electromagnetic spectrum resource. Recent research has focused on the development of efficient multiplexing techniques in the millimeter-wave band (1-10 mm, or 30-300 GHz) due to the promise of large available bandwidth for future wireless networks. Frequency-division multiplexing is still one of the most commonly-used techniques to maximize the transmission capacity of a wireless network. Based on the frequency-selective tunnelling effect of the low-loss epsilon-near-zero metamaterial waveguide, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate five-channel frequency-division multiplexing and demultiplexing in the millimeter-wave range. We show that this device architecture offers great flexibility to manipulate the filter Q-factors and the transmission spectra of different channels, by changing of the epsilon-near-zero metamaterial waveguide topology and by adding a standard waveguide between two epsilon-near-zero channels. This strategy of frequency-division multiplexing may pave a way for efficiently allocating the spectrum for future communication networks., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures

Functional tunability, environmental adaptability, and easy fabrication are highly desired properties in metasurfaces. Here we provide a tunable bilayer metasurface composed of two stacked identical dielectric magnetic mirrors, which are excited by the dominant electric dipole and other magnetic multipoles, exhibiting nonlocal electric field enhancement near the interface and high reflection. Differ from the tunability through the direct superposition of two structures with different functionalities, we achieve the reversible conversion between high reflection and high transmission by manipulating the interlayer coupling near the interface between the two magnetic mirrors. The magnetic mirror effect boosts the interlayer coupling when the interlayer spacing is small. Decreasing the interlayer spacing of the bilayer metasurface leads to stronger interlayer coupling and scattering suppression of the meta-atom, which results in high transmission. On the contrary, increasing the spacing leads to weaker interlayer coupling and scattering enhancement, which results in high reflection. The high transmission of the bilayer metasurface has good robustness due to that the meta-atom with interlayer coupling can maintain the scattering suppression against adjacent meta-atom movement and disordered position perturbation. This work provides a straightforward method (i.e. stacking magnetic mirrors) to design tunable metasurface, shed new light on high-performance optical switches applied in communication and sensing.

Using the Floquet Hamiltonian derived based on the time-dependent perturbation theory, we investigated the quasienergy bands of a one-dimensional time-Floquet photonic crystal. The time-Floquet photonic crystal contains two alternating layers labeled as A and B, and the permittivity of A layer is modulated periodically in time. We showed that the quasienergy bands are reciprocal when the modulation function is a function of time only, while the quasienergy bands could be nonreciprocal when the permittivity is modulated in both time and space through an unique combination. In the former case, the coupling between the positive (negative) and positive (negative) bands results in quasienergy gaps, while the coupling between the positive and negative bands leads to pairs of exception points, when the modulation is on the real part of the permittivity. In the latter case, the coupling between the positive (negative) and positive (negative) bands still results in quasienergy gaps. However, the coupling between the positive and negative bands leads to quasienergy gaps at a small modulation speed and pairs of exceptional points at a high modulation speed., Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures

Common optical metasurfaces are 2-dimensional functional devices composed of periodically arranged subwavelength constituents. Here, we achieved the positional-disorder-immune metasurfaces composed of core-shell cylinders which successively exhibit the magnetic dipole (MD) resonant, non-radiating anapole, and electric dipole (ED) resonant modes when their outer radii are fixed and the inner radii changes continuously in a range. The performances of the metasurfaces under a periodically structural design are not degraded even when the positions of the cylinders are subjected to random and considerable displacements. The positional-disorder-immunity is due to the weak non-local effect of the metasurfaces. Because the multiple scattering among cylinders is weak and insensitive to the spacing among the cylinders around the ED and MD resonant modes and vanishing irrespective of the spacing at the non-radiating anapole mode, the reflection properties including the reflection phase and reflectivity of the metasurfaces are insensitive to the spacing between neighboring cylinders for this entire variation range of the inner radius. The positional-disorder-immunity make the metasurface to be adapted to some unstable and harsh environments., Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures

Photonic pseudospin-1/2 systems, which exhibit Dirac cone dispersion at Brillouin zone corners in analogy to graphene, have been extensively studied in recent years. However, it is known that a linear band crossing of two bands cannot emerge at the center of Brillouin zone in a two-dimensional photonic system respecting time reversal symmetry. Using a square lattice of elliptical magneto-optical cylinders, we constructed an unpaired Dirac point at the Brillouin zone center as the intersection of the second and third bands corresponding to the monopole and dipole excitations. Effective medium theory can be applied to the two linearly crossed bands with the effective constitutive parameters numerically calculated using the boundary effective medium approach. It is shown that only the effective permittivity approaches zero while the determinant of the nonzero effective permeability vanishes at the Dirac point frequency, showing a different behavior from the double-zero index metamaterials obtained from the pseudospin-1 triply degenerate points for time reversal symmetric systems. Exotic phenomena, such as the Klein tunneling and Zitterbewegung, in the pseudospin-1/2 system can be well understood from the effective medium description. When the Dirac point is lifted, the edge state dispersion near the $\Gamma$ point can be accurately predicted by the effective constitutive parameters. We also further realized magneto-optical complex conjugate metamaterials for a wide frequency range by introducing a particular type of non-Hermittian perturbations which make the two linear bands coalescence to form exceptional points at the real frequency., Comment: 48 pages, 14 figures

Metagratings have been shown to form an agile and efficient platform for extreme wavefront manipulation, going beyond the limitations of gradient metasurfaces. Previous approaches for transmissive metagratings have resorted on compound asymmetric inclusions to achieve single-channel near-perfect diffraction. However, such complex inclusions are sensitive to geometric parameters and lack the flexibility for arbitrary phase modulation, restricting applications to beam deflection. Here, we show perfect unitary diffraction in all-dielectric transmissive metagratings using rectangular inclusions by tailoring their multipole interferences. Using this principle, we experimentally demonstrate analog phase profile encoding of a hologram through displacement modulation of CMOS-compatible silicon nitride nanobars, manifesting broadband and wide-angle high diffraction efficiencies for both polarizations and across the entire visible range. Featured with extreme angle/wavelength/polarization tolerance and alleviated structural complexity for both design and fabrication, our demonstration unlocks the full potential of metagrating-based wavefront manipulation for a variety of practical applications.

We demonstrate an air-core single-mode hollow waveguide that uses Bragg reflector structures in place of the vertical metal walls of the standard rectangular waveguide or via holes of the so-called substrate integrated waveguide. The high-order modes in the waveguide are substantially suppressed by a modal-filtering effect, making the waveguide operate in the fundamental mode over more than one octave. Numerical simulations show that the propagation loss of the proposed waveguide can be lower than that of classic hollow metallic rectangular waveguides at terahertz frequencies, benefiting from a significant reduction in Ohmic loss. To facilitate fabrication and characterization, a proof-of-concept 20 to 45 GHz waveguide is demonstrated, which verifies the properties and advantages of the proposed waveguide. A zero group-velocity dispersion point is observed at near the middle of the operating band. This work offers a step towards a novel hybrid transmission-line medium that can be used in a variety of functional components for broadband millimeter-wave and terahertz applications., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, journal article

Strong vibrational coupling has been realized in a variety of mechanical systems from cavity optomechanics to electromechanics.$^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}$ It is an essential requirement for enabling quantum control over the vibrational states.$^{6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11}$ The majority of the mechanical systems that have been studied to date are vibrational resonances of dielectric or semiconductor nanomaterials coupled to optical modes.$^{12, 13, 14, 15}$ While there are fewer studies of coupling between two mechanical modes,$^{3, 9}$ particularly, there have been no experimental observation of strong coupling of the ultra-high frequency acoustic modes of plasmonic nanostructures, due to the rapid energy dissipation in these systems. Here we realized strong vibrational coupling in ultra-high frequency plasmonic nanoresonators by increasing the vibrational quality factors by an order of magnitude. This is achieved through blocking an energy dissipation pathway in the form of out-going acoustic waves. We achieved the highest frequency quality factor products of $\mathbf{f}\times\mathbf{Q}=1.0\times10^{13}$ Hz for the fundamental mechanical modes in room temperature plasmonic nanoresonators reported to date, which exceeds the value of $0.1\times10^{13}$ Hz required for ground state cooling. Avoided crossing were observed between the vibrational modes of two plasmonic nanoresonators with a coupling rate of $\mathbf{g}=7.5\pm 1.2$ GHz, an order of magnitude larger than the dissipation rates. The intermodal strong coupling was consistent with theoretical calculations using a coupled oscillator model. Our results expanded the strong coupling systems for mechanical resonators and enabled a platform for future observation and control of the quantum behavior of phonon modes in metallic nanoparticles., Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures

We show that, a metasurface composed of subwavelength metallic slit array embedded in an asymmetric environment can exhibit either extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) or extraordinary optical diffraction (EOD). By employing an analytical model expansion method and the diffraction order chart in k-vector space, we found that the resonance decaying pathway of the local slit cavity mode can be tuned to either 0th or -1st diffraction order by changing the parallel wavevector, which gives rise to enhanced 0th transmission (EOT) of the structure for small incident angles, and enhanced -1st diffraction (EOD) for large incident angles. Based on this appealing feature, a multifunctional metasurface that can switch its functionality between transmission filter, mirror and off-axis lens is demonstrated. Our findings provide a convenient way to construct multifunctional integrated optical devices on a single planar device., Comment: 18 Pages, 5 figures

Recently, an achromatic metasurface was successfully demonstrated to deflect light of multiple wavelengths in the same direction and it was further applied to the design of planar lenses without chromatic aberrations [Science, 347, 1342(2015)]. However, such metasurface can only work for normal incidence and exhibit low conversion efficiency. Here, we present an ultrawide-angle and high-efficiency metasurface without chromatic aberration for wavefront shaping in visible range. The metasurface is constructed by multiple metallic nano-groove gratings, which support enhanced diffractions for an ultrawide incident angle range from 10o to 80o due to the excitations of localized gap plasmon modes at different resonance wavelengths. Incident light at these resonance wavelengths can be efficiently diffracted into the same direction with complete suppression of the specular reflection. This approach is applied to the design of an achromatic flat lens for focusing light of different wavelengths into the same position. Our findings provide a facile way to design various achromatic flat optical elements for imaging and display applications.