Describing the phenomenon of total internal reflection in terms of a reflection coefficient of unit magnitude, we found that, not only can propagating plane waves be total internally reflected at the planar interface of two dissimilar, homogeneous, isotropic dielectric-magnetic mediums, but evanescent plane waves can also be. The refracting medium must be the optically denser of the two mediums for total internal reflection of an evanescent plane wave to occur.
When Reflection and Transmission Amplitude Coefficients Exceed Unity: Evanescent Waves, Resonances, and Optical Modes
Instituto de materiais da USC - iMATUS, Grupo de Nanomateriais, Fotónica e Materia Branda, Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学应用物理系纳米材料、光子和软物质组iMATUS研究所）
We introduce optical polarization-insensitive high pass filters based on total internal reflection of light at the interface of two dielectric media (1D) and Bragg reflection of a multilayer stack (2D) in transmission mode. The wavevectors in the stopband become coupled to evanescent waves in our design, rather than the zero of a narrow-band resonant mode. This provides remarkable resolution enhancement for edge detection applications. Rigorous analysis based on plane wave expansion is carried out and the results are verified by full-wave numerical simulation. Also for the case of multilayer s…
Watt-level, all-fiber, ultrafast Er/Yb-codoped double-clad fiber laser mode-locked by reduced graphene oxide interacting with a weak evanescent field
提出了一种利用还原氧化石墨烯（rGO）与光子晶体光纤（PCF）的弱倏逝场相互作用实现被动锁模的瓦级、全光纤、超快Er/Yb共掺双包层光纤激光器。基于全反射原理，将rGO溶液填充到PCF的包层孔中，蒸发后的rGO薄片仅承担激光系统总能量的1/107，提高了PCF的热损伤阈值，降低了累积非线性。通过将可饱和吸收体引入Er/Yb共掺光纤环形腔中，获得了持续时间为573 fs的稳定的常规孤子，平均输出功率达1.14 W.
Evanescent waves are central to many technologies such as near-field imaging that beats the diffraction limit and plasmonic devices. Frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) is an experimental method commonly used to study evanescent waves. In this paper, we shape the incident beam of the FTIR process with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and measure light transmittance while varying the path length difference and interferometric visibility. Our results show that the transmittance varies with the path length difference and, thus, the intensity distribution of the shaped beam. Experiment and fi…
Conventional coherent absorption occurs only when two incident beams exhibit mirror symmetry with respect to the absorbing surface, i.e., the two beams have the same incident angles, phases, and amplitudes. In this work, we propose a more general metasurface paradigm for coherent perfect absorption, with impinging waves from arbitrary asymmetric directions. By exploiting excitation of unidirectional evanescent waves, the output can be fixed at one reflection direction for any amplitude and phase of the control wave. We show theoretically and confirm experimentally that the relative amplitude o…
Manipulation of subwavelength objects by engineering the electromagnetic waves in the environment medium is pivotal for several particle handling techniques. In this letter, we theoretically demonstrate the possibility of engineering a compact and tunable plasmon-based terahertz tweezer using a graphene monolayer that is deposited on a high-index substrate. Under total-internal-reflection illumination, such device is shown to be capable of inducing an enhanced rotating polarizability thus enabling directional near-field coupling into the graphene plasmon mode and radiation modes in the substra…
Recently, the complexity behind manipulations of reflected fields by metasurfaces has been addressed showing that, even in the simplest scenarios, non-local response and excitation of auxiliary evanescent fields are required for perfect field control. Although these solutions theoretically allow to reflect incident plane waves into any desired direction, actual implementations are difficult and, in most cases, require extensive numerical optimization of the metamirror topology. In this work we introduce purely local reflective metasurfaces for arbitrary manipulations of the power distribution …
Ultra-compact, densely integrated optical components manufactured on a CMOS-foundry platform are highly desirable for optical information processing and electronic-photonic co-integration. However, the large spatial extent of evanescent waves arising from nanoscale confinement, ubiquitous in silicon photonic devices, causes significant cross-talk and scattering loss. Here, we demonstrate that anisotropic all-dielectric metamaterials open a new degree of freedom in total internal reflection to shorten the decay length of evanescent waves. We experimentally show the reduction of cross-talk by gr…
The present study addresses the question of total internal reflection of a plane wave from an amplifying or attenuating medium. Inspection on the expressions for the modal gain or loss of an asymmetric planar waveguide having an amplifying or attenuating cladding has led us to the coefficients for amplified or attenuated internal reflection. The derived formulas suggest an interpretation that the refracted inhomogeneous plane wave undergoes amplification or attenuation while it travels a distance equal to the Goos-Hänchen shift along the boundary plane before going back into the high-index med…
Optical tomographic reconstruction of a 3D nanoscale specimen is hindered by the axial diffraction limit, which is 2-3 times worse than the focal plane resolution. We propose and experimentally demonstrate an axial super-resolution evanescent wave tomography (AxSET) method that enables the use of regular evanescent wave microscopes like Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscope (TIRF) beyond surface imaging, and achieve tomographic reconstruction with axial super-resolution. Our proposed method based on Fourier reconstruction achieves axial super-resolution by extracting information fr…
We present an optical element for the separation of superimposed beams which only differ in angle. The beams are angularly resolved and separated by total internal reflection at an air gap between two prisms. As a showcase application, we demonstrate the separation of superimposed beams of different diffraction orders directly behind acousto-optic modulators for an operating wavelength of 800nm. The wavelength as well as the component size can easily be adapted to meet the requirements of a wide variety of applications. The presented optical element allows to reduce the lengths of beam paths a…
A new strategy for eliminating photocurrent losses due to the metal contacts on the front of a solar cell was proposed, simulated, and tested. By placing triangular cross-section lines of low refractive index on top of the contacts, total-internal reflection at the interface of the low-index triangles and the surrounding material can direct light away from the metal and into the photoactive absorber. Simulations indicated that losses can be eliminated for any incident angle, and that yearly energy production improvements commensurate with the metallized area are possible. Proof of principle ex…
In this work we study the scattering and transfer matrices for electric fields defined with respect to an angular spectrum of plane waves. For these matrices, we derive the constraints that are enforced by conservation of energy, reciprocity and time reversal symmetry. Notably, we examine the general case of vector fields in three dimensions and allow for evanescent field components. Moreover, we consider fields described by both continuous and discrete angular spectra, the latter being more relevant to practical applications, such as optical scattering experiments. We compare our results to b…
Dynamics light scattering (DLS) is a widely used techniques to characterize dynamics in soft phases. Evanescent Wave DLS refers to the case of total internal reflection DLS that probes near interface dynamics. We here investigate the use of EWDLS for turbid sample. Using combination of ray-tracing simulation and experiments, we show that a significant fraction of the detected photons are scattered once and has phase shifts distinct from the multiple scattering fraction. It follows that the measured correlation can be separated into two contributions: a single scattering one arising from the ev…
We put forward the complex helicity theorem. It constitutes a novel law that rules the build-up of the reactive helicity through its zero time-average flow. Its imaginary Poynting momentum accounts for the accretion of reactive power, are illustrated in: evanescent waves and fields scattered from magnetodielectric dipolar nanoparticles. As for the former, we show that its reactive helicity may be experimentally observed as we introduce a reactive spin momentum and a reactive orbital momentum in terms of which we express the imaginary field momentum, whose transversal component produces an opti…
Single particle tracking has found broad applications in the life and physical sciences, enabling the observation and characterisation of nano- and microscopic motion. Fluorescence-based approaches are ideally suited for high-background environments, such as tracking lipids or proteins in or on cells, due to superior background rejection. Scattering-based detection is preferable when localisation precision and imaging speed are paramount due to the in principle infinite photon budget. Here, we show that micromirror-based total internal reflection dark field microscopy enables background suppre…
Recent research developments in the area of spacetime metamaterial structures and systems have raised new questions as to how the physics of fundamental phenomena is altered in the presence of spacetime modulation. In this context, we present a generalized and comparative description of the phenomenon of total internal reflection (TIR) at different dynamic interfaces. Such interfaces include, beyond the classical interfaces corresponding to the boundaries of moving bodies (moving interface -- moving matter systems), interfaces formed by a traveling-wave step modulation of an electromagnetic pa…
A photonic-crystal slab can support bound states in the continuum (BICs) which have infinite lifetimes but embedded into the continuous spectrum of optical modes in free space. The formation of BICs requires a total internal reflection (TIR) condition at both interfaces between the slab and free space. Here, we show that the TIR of Bloch waves can be directly obtained based on the generalized Fresnel equations proposed. If each of these Bloch waves picks up a phase with integer multiples of 2pi for traveling a round trip, light can be perfectly guided in the slab, namely, forming a BIC. A BIC …
In the present work we theoretically investigated the excitation of surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) in deformed graphene by attenuated total reflection method. We considered the Otto geometry for SPPs excitation in graphene. Efficiency of SPPs excitation strongly depends on the SPPs propagation direction. The frequency and the incident angle of the most effective excitation of SPPs strongly depend on the polarization of the incident light. Our results may open up the new possibilities for strain-induced molding flow of light at nanoscales.
The dynamical characteristics of electromagnetic fields include energy, momentum, angular momentum (spin) and helicity. We analyze their spatial distributions near the planar interface between two transparent and non-dispersive media, when the incident monochromatic plane wave with arbitrary polarization is totally reflected, and an evanescent wave is formed in the medium with lower optical density. Based on the recent arguments in favor of the Minkowski definition of the electromagnetic momentum in a material medium [Phys. Rev. A 83, 013823 (2011); 86, 055802 (2012); Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 073…
