The far-field subwavlength imaging is a challenging issue. In this letter we demonstrate numerically that the far-field subwavelength imaging of weakly scattering objects can be obtained by processing the data acquired by a single antenna, which benefits from the use of the strongly disordered medium. A mathematical model has been proposed for solving such problem based on the idea of sparse reconstruction. Moreover, this study leads to an important conclusion that the strongly disordered medium can serves as an efficient apparatus for the single-antenna compressive measurement, which shifts the complexity of devising compressive sensing (CS) hardware from the design, fabrication and electronic control. The proposed method and associated results can find applications in several imaging disciplines, such as optics, THz, RF or ultrasound imaging.
Optical absorption is usually considered deleterious, something to avoid if at all possible. We propose a broadband nanoabsorber that completely eliminates the diffracting wave, resulting in a subwavelength enhancement of the field. Broadband operation is made possible by engineering the dispersion of the complex dielectric function. The local enhancement can be significantly improved compared to the standard plane wave illumination of a metallic nanoparticle. Our numerical simulation shows that an optical pulse as short as 6 fs can be focused to a 11 nm region. Not only the local field, but a…
We computationally study a subwavelength dielectric grating structure, show that slab waveguide modes can be used to obtain broadband high reflectivity, and analyze how slab waveguide modes influence reflection. A structure showing interference between Fabry-Perot modes, slab waveguide modes, and waveguide array modes is designed with ultra-broadband high reflectivity. Owing to the coupling of guided modes, the region with reflectivity R > 0.99 has an ultra-high bandwidth ( Δf/f > 30%). The incident-angle region with R > 0.99 extends over a range greater than 40°. Moreover, an asymmetric waveg…
In this letter we study the subwavelength imaging of sparse broadband sources inside a disordered medium by processing the data acquired by a single antenna. A mathematical model has been developed for solving such problem based on the idea of sparse reconstruction. We show that the strongly disordered medium can serves as an efficient apparatus for compressive measurement, which shifts the complexity of devising compressive sensing (CS) hardware from the design, fabrication and electronic control. The proposed method and associated results can find applications in several imaging disciplines,…
In this paper we suggest and theoretically study a tapered plasmonic nanostructure which connects the incident wave beam with a subwavelength spatial region where the field is locally enhanced in a broad frequency range or for different operation frequencies. This spatial region has a frequency stable location near the contour of the tapered structure. This results from a special waveguide mode which can also exist in the tapered structure. We foresee many possible applications for our structure from prospective near-field scanning optical microscopes to interconnects between conventional opti…
We study theoretically light focusing at subwavelength scale inside a disordered strongly scattering open medium. We show that broadband time reversal at a single point antenna, in conjunction with near-field interactions and multiple scattering, produces spatial focusing with a quality comparable to that obtained in an ideal closed cavity. This gives new perspectives for super-resolved optical imaging and coherent control of single nanosources or absorbers in complex media.
We unveil a previously overlooked wave propagation regime in magnetized plasmonic (gyrotropic) materials with comparable plasma and cyclotron frequencies, which enables a giant and broadband (nondispersive) nonreciprocal response. We show that this effect is due to a natural form of dispersion compensation that ultimately originates from the subtle implications of the principle of causality for gyrotropic plasmonic media, which allows the existence of a low-loss frequency window with anomalous nonmonotonic dispersion for the extraordinary mode. This is in stark contrast with conventional nongy…
Allowing a high quality factor (Q-factor) to a sub-wavelength dielectric resonator, quasi-bound states in the continuum (Q-BIC) has gained much interest. However, the Q-BIC resonance condition is too sensitive to the geometry of the resonator and its practical broadband generation on a single-wafer platform has been limited. Here, we present that employing the base angle as a structural degree of freedom, the truncated nano-cone resonator supports the Q-BIC resonance with a high Q-factor of >150 over a wide wavelength range of >100 nm. We expect our approach will boost the utilization of the Q…
Differing from the traditional method of achieving subwavelength interference, we have demonstrated the two-photon subwavelength interference effect of broadband chaotic light in a polarization-selective Michelson interferometer with an ultrafast two-photon absorption detector the first time, which is achieved by manipulating two-photon probability amplitudes involved in the interference. In theory, the two-photon polarization coherence matrix and probability amplitudes matrix are combined to develop polarized two-photon interference terms, which explains the experimental results well. In orde…
The absorption to mass ratio of the infrared arrays is enhanced to approximately 1.33 to 7.33 times larger than the previously reported structures by incorporating two design characteristics: first, the coupling of evanescent fields in the air gaps around pixels to create effectively larger pixel sizes, and, second, the use of guided mode resonance (GMR) within the subwavelength metal-dielectric gratings. The bilayer Ti-Si3N4 gratings achieve broadband long-wave infrared (LWIR, 8 to 12 um) absorption by the combined effects of free carrier absorption by the thin Ti films and vibrational phonon…
Optical phase shifters are extensively used in integrated optics not only for telecom and datacom applications, but also for sensors and quantum computing. While various active solutions have been demonstrated, progress in passive phase shifters is still lacking. Here, we present a new type of ultra-broadband 90° phase shifter, which exploits the anisotropy and dispersion engineering in subwavelength metamaterial waveguides. Our Floquet-Bloch calculations predict a phase shift error below $\pm$1.7° over an unprecedented operation range from 1.35 $μ$m to 1.75 $μ$m, i.e. 400 nm bandwidth coverin…
We predict the existence of a novel class of multidimensional light localizations in out-of-equilibrium ferroelectric crystals. In two dimensions, the non-diffracting beams form at arbitrary low power level and propagate even when their width is well below the optical wavelength. In three dimensions, a novel form of subwavelength light bullets is found. The effects emerge when compositionally disordered crystals are brought to their metastable glassy state, and can have a profound impact on super-resolved imaging and ultra-dense optical storage, while resembling many features of the so-called …
Reconstruction of light profiles with amplitude and phase information, called holography, is an attractive optical technique to display three-dimensional images. Due to essential requirements for an ideal hologram, subwavelength control of both amplitude and phase is crucial. Nevertheless, traditional holographic devices have suffered from their limited capabilities of incomplete modulation in both amplitude and phase of visible light. Here, we propose a novel metasurface that is capable of completely controlling both amplitude and phase profiles of visible light independently with subwaveleng…
We study the optimal diffusive transmission and absorption of broadband or polychromatic light in a disordered medium. By introducing matrices describing broadband transmission and reflection, we formulate an extremal eigenvalue problem where the optimal input wavefront is given by the corresponding eigenvector. We show analytically that a single wavefront can exhibit strongly enhanced total transmission or total absorption across a bandwidth that is orders of magnitude broader than the spectral correlation width of the medium, due to long-range correlations in coherent diffusion. We find exce…
Using a random array of coupled metallic nanowires as a generic example of disordered plasmonic systems, we demonstrate that the structural disorder induces localization of light in these nanostructures at a deep-subwavelength scale. The ab initio analysis is based on solving the complete set of 3D Maxwell equations. We find that random variations of the radius of coupled plasmonic nanowires are sufficient to induce the Anderson localization (AL) of surface-plasmon polaritons (SPPs), the size of these trapped modes being significantly smaller than the wavelength. Remarkably, the optical-gain c…
We analytically describe light transmission through a single subwavelength slit in a thin perfect electric conductor screen for the incident polarization being perpendicular to the slit, and derive simple, yet accurate, expressions for the average electric field in the slit and the transmission efficiency. The analytic results are consistent with full-wave numerical calculations, and demonstrate that slits of widths ~100nm in real metals may feature non-resonant (i.e., broadband) field enhancements of ~100 and transmission efficiency of ~10 at infrared or terahertz frequencies, with the associ…
We study the propagation of waves in a set of absorbing subwavelength scatterers positioned on a stealth hyperuniform point pattern. We show that spatial correlations in the disorder substantially enhance absorption compared to a fully disordered structure with the same density of scatterers. The non-resonant nature of the mechanism provides broad angular and spectral robustness. These results demonstrate the possibility to design low-density materials with blackbody-like absorption.
We experimentally demonstrate that a thin (~150 nm) film of vanadium dioxide (VO2) deposited on sapphire has an anomalous thermal emittance profile when heated, which arises due to the optical interaction between the film and the substrate when the VO2 is at an intermediate state of its insulator-metal transition (IMT). Within the IMT region, the VO2 film comprises nanoscale islands of metal- and dielectric-phase, and can thus be viewed as a natural, disordered metamaterial. This structure displays "perfect" blackbody-like thermal emissivity over a narrow wavelength range (~40 cm-1), surpassin…
Deep-Subwavelength and Broadband Quarter-Wave Retardation in Ultrathin Hyperbolic MoOCl2
XPANCEO；University of Rome Tor Vergata（罗马托尔维加塔大学）；University of Chemistry and Technology Prague（布拉格化工大学）；National Graphene Institute (NGI), University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学石墨烯国家研究所）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Anisotropic materials with different signs of components of the permittivity tensor are called indefinite materials. Known realizations of indefinite media suffer of high absorption losses. We show that periodic arrays of parallel carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can behave as a low-loss indefinite medium in the infrared range. We show that a finite-thickness slab of CNTs supports the propagation of backward waves with small attenuation in an ultra-broad frequency band. In prospective, CNT arrays can be used for subwavelength focusing and detection, enhancing the radiation efficiency of small sources.
We demonstrate in microwave measurements the broadband enhancement of transmission through an opaque barrier due to mirror symmetry. This enhancement relies on constructive interference between mirror scattering paths resulting from strong internal reflections at the left and right interfaces of a multichannel cavity. We observe a strong sensitivity of the conductance to a shift of the barrier from the center of the cavity. Remarkably, the impact of mirror symmetry can be further increased by tuning the degree of disorder within the cavity. We report an additional enhancement of the conductanc…
A point source in a disordered scattering medium generates a speckle pattern with non-universal features, giving rise to the so-called C_0 correlation. We analyze theoretically the relationship between the C_0 correlation and the statistical fluctuations of the local density of states, based on simple arguments of energy conservation. This derivation leads to a clear physical interpretation of the C_0 correlation. Using exact numerical simulations, we show that C_0 is essentially a correlation resulting from near-field interactions. These interactions are responsible for the non-universality o…
An ultra-broadband transverse magnetic (TM) pass hyperuniform disordered photonic crystal (HUDPC) polarizer is proposed and demonstrated on a silicon-on-insulator platform. Propagation of the transverse electric mode is blocked by three combined effects, including the photonic bandgap (PBG) effect, diffusive (non-resonant) scattering, and bandedge resonances. Specially, the designed 30-dB bandwidth in polarization extinction ratio (PER) of 265 nm is much larger than the spectral width of the PBG (149 nm) due to using the bandedge resonances. The TM mode is in the subwavelength regime of the HU…
Spectroscopic gas sensing is both a commercial success and a rapidly advancing scientific field. Throughout the years, massive efforts have been directed towards improving detection limits by achieving long interaction pathlengths. Prominent examples include the use of conventional multipass gas cells, sophisticated high-finesse cavities, gas-filled holey fibers, integrating spheres, and diffusive reflectors. Despite this rich flora of approaches, there is a continuous struggle to reduce size, gas volume, cost and alignment complexity. Here, we show that extreme light scattering in porous mate…
Far-field imaging beyond the diffraction limit is a long sought-after goal in various imaging applications, which requires usually an array of antennas or mechanical scanning. Here, we present an alternative and novel concept for this challenging problem: a single radar system consisting of a spatial-temporal resonant aperture antenna (referred to as the slavery antenna) and a broadband horn antenna (termed the master antenna). We theoretically demonstrate that such resonant aperture antenna is responsible for converting parts of the evanescent waves into propagating waves, and delivering them…
Aligned, densely-packed carbon nanotube metamaterials prepared using vacuum filtration are an emerging infrared nanophotonic material. We report multiple hyperbolic plasmon resonances, together spanning the mid-infrared, in individual resonators made from aligned and densely-packed carbon nanotubes. In the first near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) imaging study of nanotube metamaterial resonators, we observe distinct deeply-subwavelength field profiles at the fundamental and higher-order resonant frequencies. The wafer-scale area of the nanotube metamaterials allows us to combine thi…
Understanding light-matter interaction in disordered photonic media allows people to manipulate light scattering and achieve exciting applications using seemingly scrambled media. As the concentration of scattering particles rises, they are inclined to step into near fields of each other in deep subwavelength scale. The fundamental physics involving the interplay between disorder and near-field interaction (NFI) is still not fully understood. We theoretically examine the role of NFI by analyzing the underlying multiple scattering mechanism. We find NFI leads to a stronger collective behavior i…
Unidirectionally propagating waves (UPW) such as topologically protected edge modes and surface magnetoplasmons (SMPs) has been a research hotspot in the last decades. In the study of UPW, metals are usually treated as perfect electric conductors (PECs) which, in general, are the boundary conditions. However, it was reported that the transverse resonance condition induced by the PEC wall(s) may significantly narrow up the complete one-way propagation (COWP) band. In this paper, we propose two ways to achieve ultra-broadband one-way waveguide in terahertz regime. The first way is utilizing the …
Hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhPs) sustained in van der Waals (vdW) materials exhibit extraordinary capabilities of confining long-wave electromagnetic fields to the deep subwavelength scale. In stark contrast to the uniaxial vdW hyperbolic materials such as hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), the recently emerging biaxial hyperbolic materials such as α-MoO3 and α-V2O5 further bring new degree of freedoms in controlling light at the flatland, due to their distinctive in-plane hyperbolic dispersion. However, the controlling and focusing of such in-plane HPhPs are to date remain elusive. Here, we …
In the field of cavity nano-optomechanics, the nanoresonator-in-the-middle approach consists in inserting a sub-wavelength sized deformable resonator, here a nanowire, in the small mode volume of a fiber microcavity. Internal resonances in the nanowire enhance the light nanowire interaction which provide giant coupling strengthes -- sufficient to enter the single photon regime of cavity optomechanics -- at the condition to precisely position the nanowire within the cavity field. Here we expose a theoretical description that combines an analytical formulation of the Mie-scattering of the intrac…
We present an analytical description and an experimental realization of interscale mixing microscopy, a diffraction-based imaging technique that is capable of detecting wavelength/10 objects in far-field measurements with both coherent and incoherent broadband light. This method aims at recovering the spatial spectrum of light diffracted by a subwavelength object based on far-field measurements of the interference created by the object and a finite diffraction grating. A single measurement, analyzing the multiple diffraction orders, is often sufficient to determine the parameters of the object…
Metasurfaces composed of subwavelength unit cells usually require a large number of unit cells which leads to complicated design and optimization. Aggressive discretization in a metasurface can significantly reduce the number of unit cells within a period, resulting in lower requirement for phase and/or surface impedance coverage. Additionally, the enlarged unit cells will encounter negligible mutual couplings when combined together, hence making straightforward the process of metasurface design. These advantages combine to allow the design of a novel class of metasurfaces which support the hi…
Complex dielectric media often appear opaque because light traveling through them is scattered multiple times. Although the light scattering is a random process, different paths through the medium can be correlated encoding information about the medium. Here, we present spectroscopic measurements of nonuniversal intensity correlations that emerge when embedding quantum emitters inside a disordered photonic crystal that is found to Anderson-localize light. The emitters probe in-situ the microscopic details of the medium, and imprint such near-field properties onto the far-field correlations. Ou…
Nanoscale generation of individual photons in confined geometries is an exciting research field aiming at exploiting localized electromagnetic fields for light manipulation. One of the outstanding challenges of photonic systems combining emitters with nanostructured media is the selective channelling of photons emitted by embedded sources into specific optical modes and their transport at distant locations in integrated systems. Here, we show that soft-matter nanofibers, electrospun with embedded emitters, combine subwavelength field localization and large broadband near-field coupling with lo…
Essentially, the idea of improving the resolution of a given imaging system is to enhance its information capacity represented usually by the temporal-bandwidth (or, spatial-spectrum) product. This letter introduces the concept of super-resonant lens, and demonstrates theoretically that the information capacity of a far-field imaging system can be efficiently driven up when three basic requirements are satisfied: the super-resonance, the near-field coupling between imaged objects and the used super-resonant lens, and the broadband illumination, which leads to the subwavelength image of imaged …
Electronic matter waves traveling through the weak and smoothly varying disorder potential of a semi-conductor show branching behavior instead of a smooth spreading of flow. By transferring this phenomenon to optics, we show how the branched flow of light can be controlled to propagate along a single branch rather than through many of them at the same time. Our method is based on shaping the incoming wavefront and only requires partial knowledge of the system's transmission matrix. We show that the light flowing along a single branch has a broadband frequency stability such that we can even st…
