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Materials and their geometry make up the tools for designing nanophotonic devices. In the past, the real part of the refractive index of materials has remained the focus for designing novel devices. The absorption, or imaginary index, was tolerated as an undesirable effect. However, a clever distribution of imaginary index of materials offers an additional degree of freedom for designing nanophotonic devices. Non-Hermitian optics provides a unique opportunity to take advantage of absorption losses in materials to enable unconventional physical effects. Typically occurring near energy degeneracies called exceptional points, these effects include enhanced sensitivity, unidirectional invisibility, and non-trivial topology. In this work, we leverage plasmonic absorption losses (or imaginary index) as a design parameter for non-Hermitian, passive parity-time symmetric metasurfaces. We show that coupled plasmonic-photonic resonator pairs, possessing a large asymmetry in absorptive losses but balanced radiative losses, exhibit an optical phase transition at an exceptional point and directional scattering. These systems enable new pathways for metasurface design using phase, symmetry, and topology as powerful tools.
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Non-Hermitian metasurface with non-trivial topology
Abstract The synergy between topology and non-Hermiticity in photonics holds immense potential for next-generation optical devices that are robust against defects. However, most demonstrations of non-Hermitian and topological photonics have been limited to super-wavelength scales due to increased radiative losses at the deep-subwavelength scale. By carefully designing radiative losses at the nanoscale, we demonstrate a non-Hermitian plasmonic–dielectric metasurface in the visible with non-trivial topology. The metasurface is based on a fourth order passive parity-time symmetric system. The designed device exhibits an exceptional concentric ring in its momentum space and is described by a Hamiltonian with a non-Hermitian Z 3 $${\mathbb{Z}}_{3}$$ topological invariant of V = −1. Fabricated devices are characterized using Fourier-space imaging for single-shot k -space measurements. Our results demonstrate a way to combine topology and non-Hermitian nanophotonics for designing robust devices with novel functionalities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1935446
- PAR ID:
- 10354946
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nanophotonics
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2192-8614
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1159 to 1165
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2021-0731
