Nonlinear, tunable, and active optical metasurface with liquid film

Abstract

Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces which emerged in the course of the last few decades have revolutionized our understanding of light and light-matter interaction. While solid materials are naturally employed as key building elements for construction of optical metamaterials mainly due to their structural stability, practically no attention was given to study of liquid-made optical 2D metasurfaces and the underlying interaction regimes between surface optical modes and liquids. In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons and slab waveguide modes that propagate within a thin liquid dielectric film, trigger optical self-induced interaction facilitated by surface tension effects, which lead to formation of 2D optical liquid-made lattices/metasurfaces with tunable symmetry and which can be leveraged for tuning of lasing modes. Furthermore, we show that the symmetry breaking of the 2D optical liquid lattice leads to phase transition and tuning of its topological properties which allows to form, destruct and move Dirac-points in the k-space. Our results indicate that optical liquid lattices support extremely low lasing threshold relative to solid dielectric films and have the potential to serve as configurable analogous computation platform.

Manipulation of Terahertz Wave Based on Three-Layer Transmissive Pancharatnam-Berry Phase Metasurface

“…It should be noted that all dielectric metasurface structures have been proposed in our previous paper [62], and the element structure of the proposed metasurface belongs to resonant type of metasurfaces [63,64]. This kind of resonance phase metasurface can move the resonance frequency through the change of structural parameters, and then change the phase of a certain frequency point, resulting in phase mutation.…”

Full Complex‐Amplitude Modulation of Second Harmonic Generation with Nonlinear Metasurfaces

“…The latest advances in metasurfaces revealed their great advantages for nonlinear wave generation and manipulation. [ 31–50 ] The phase‐matching condition in nonlinear process can be significantly relaxed in metasurfaces since their thickness is at the subwavelength scale. Meanwhile, the localized surface plasmonic resonances in metasurfaces can generate strong enhancement of the electromagnetic fields near the nanoparticles and can greatly boost the efficiency of high harmonic generation.…”

Enhancement of Transmission Efficiency on Pancharatnam−Berry Geometric Phase Encoding Metasurfaces

“…However, the encoding efficiency of transmissive EM is seriously affected by the Ohmic loss of metal materials, [ 12,26 ] which makes the current research on the regulation of abnormal reflection beams more mature. [ 27 − 29 ] In contrast, transmission encoding metasurfaces are relatively rare and urgent to be studied. Furthermore, the control of the encoded metasurface on the light wavefront is generally limited to discrete beam control, and since the coding is a minimum gradient code sequence multiplied by discrete integers instead of continuous real numbers, the continuous phase distribution of the coded metasurface cannot be realized.…”