Search

Symmetry-driven phenomena arising in nonlocal metasurfaces supporting quasi-bound states in the continuum (q-BICs) have been opening new avenues to tailor enhanced light-matter interactions via perturbative design principles. Geometric phase concepts - observed in many physical systems - are particularly useful in nonlocal metasurfaces, as they enable to locally pattern the q-BIC scattering rate and phase across the metasurface aperture without affecting the delocalized nature of the q-BIC resonance. However, this control typically comes with stringent limitations in terms of efficiency and/or of polarization operation. Here, we unveil a new form of geometric phase control, accumulated along a continuous contour of geometric perturbations that parametrically encircle a singularity associated with a bound state. This response is obtained regardless of the chosen polarization state, which can be rationally specified by a judicious choice of the perturbation geometry. Our findings extend geometric phase concepts to arbitrary polarizations, including linear and elliptical states, with near-unity scattering efficiency. This polarization-agnostic geometric phase offers new opportunities for wavefront manipulation, multifunctional operation and light emission, with applications in augmented reality, secure communications, wireless systems, imaging, lasing, nonlinear and quantum optics., Comment: 52 pages, 14 figures

Coherent wave control exploits the interference among multiple waves impinging on a system to suppress or enhance outgoing signals based on their relative phase and amplitude. This process inherently requires non-Hermiticity, in order to enable energy exchanges among the waves, and spatial interfaces in order to tailor their scattering. Here we explore the temporal analogue of this phenomenon, based on time-interfaces that support instantaneous non-Hermitian scattering events for photons analogous to mechanical collisions. Based on this mechanism, we demonstrate ultra-broadband temporal coherent wave control and photonic collisions with phase-tunable elastic features, and apply them to erase, enhance and reshape arbitrary pulses by suitably tailoring the amplitude and phase of counterpropagating signals. Our findings provide a pathway to effectively sculpt broadband light with light without requiring spatial boundaries, within an ultrafast and low-energy platform.

Time-reflection is a uniform inversion of the temporal evolution of a signal, which arises when an abrupt change in the properties of the host material occurs uniformly in space. At such a time-interface, a portion of the input signal is time-reversed, and its frequency spectrum is homogeneously translated while its momentum is conserved, forming the temporal counterpart of a spatial interface. Combinations of time-interfaces, forming time-metamaterials and Floquet matter, exploit the interference of multiple time-reflections for extreme wave manipulation, leveraging time as a new degree of freedom. Here, we report the observation of photonic time-reflection and associated broadband frequency translation in a switched transmission-line metamaterial whose effective capacitance is homogeneously and abruptly changed via a synchronized array of switches. A pair of temporal interfaces are combined to demonstrate time-reflection-induced wave interference, realizing the temporal counterpart of a Fabry-Perot cavity. Our results establish the foundational building blocks to realize time-metamaterials and Floquet photonic crystals, with opportunities for extreme photon manipulation in space and time.

We present the end-to-end design of compact passive and lossless metasurface (MTS) antennas with integrated feeds. The complete low-profile system consists of a single-layered reactive impedance MTS printed on top of a grounded dielectric substrate, and is fed by sources which are embedded inside the substrate. An accurate and efficient volume-surface integral equation-based model of the device is developed, and used as the basis for the rapid optimization of its performance. The optimized designs leverage tailored auxiliary surface waves supported by the impedance MTS to distribute the localized source power across their apertures. This facilitates the realization of extreme field transformations such as wide-angle beam-forming or shared-aperture beam-forming, with nearly 100% aperture efficiencies. The procedure also allows for arbitrary beam-shaping with complete main beam and side lobe control. We also derive several feasibility-related constraints, which can significantly enhance the power efficiency as well as the bandwidth of the MTS antennas when they are implemented in practice. Full-wave numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of the presented approach, as well as the extreme field transformation capabilities of the synthesized designs.

We present a highly efficient metagrating-assisted antenna (MGA) architecture with a simple integrated feed. Power from a localized line source is distributed throughout the arbitrarily large antenna aperture with the help of a passive and lossless electromagnetic metagrating (MG). With appropriately designed meta-wire loading, the omnidirectional source field can be efficiently transformed into directive radiation. To aid the design process, a 2-dimensional volume-surface integral equation framework which accurately predicts the radiation pattern of the MGA is developed. Through constrained optimization, the directivity of the MGA in the desired direction is maximized. In this way, extreme-angle beam steering is demonstrated.

We present methods for analyzing and designing cylindrical electromagnetic metasurfaces with non-circular cross sections based on conformal transformations. It can be difficult to treat surfaces with non-canonical geometries since they generally do not admit straightforward solutions to the Helmholtz wave equation subject to the appropriate boundary conditions. This leads to the reliance on full wave numerical techniques which are only suitable for the analysis, but not the synthesis, of these surfaces. We address this issue by employing conformal transformations to map the physical space into a computational space in which the surface coincides with a circular cylinder. The electromagnetic boundary conditions on the surface remain intact under the transformations due to their angle-preserving nature. However, they are much more easily enforced. As a result, analytical modal solutions for the scattered fields are readily obtainable, which facilitate closed-form analysis and synthesis equations for general non-circular cylindrical metasurfaces. One important utility enabled by the proposed framework is the efficient identification of electromagnetic field distributions that satisfy local power conservation. This leads to passive and lossless surface designs, which are highly desirable in practice as they do not require active and/or lossy components.

This paper presents a framework for analyzing and designing cylindrical omega-bianisotropic metasurfaces, inspired by mode matching and digital signal processing techniques. Using the discrete Fourier transform, we decompose the the electromagnetic field distributions into orthogonal cylindrical modes and convert the azimuthally varying metasurface constituent parameters into their respective spectra. Then, by invoking appropriate boundary conditions, we set up systems of algebraic equations which can be rearranged to either predict the scattered fields of prespecified metasurfaces, or to synthesize metasurfaces which support arbitrarily stipulated field transformations. The proposed framework facilitates the efficient evaluation of field distributions that satisfy local power conservation, which is one of the key difficulties involved with the design of passive and lossless scalar metasurfaces. It represents a promising solution to circumvent the need for active components, controlled power dissipation, or tensorial surface polarizabilities in many state-of-the art conformal metasurface-based devices. To demonstrate the robustness and the versatility of the proposed technique, we design several devices intended for different applications and numerically verify them using finite element simulations.