Light concentration with strong temporal and spatial confinement is crucial for tailoring light-matter interaction. Electromagnetic cavity modes in photonic and plasmonic resonators provide platforms for optical field localization. Here, we propose a concept of quasi-bound states in the continuum gap cavity and reveal that ultra spatiotemporal confinements in free-space can be realized in a dielectric nanocavity metasurface. By introducing an asymmetric air slot in a nanodisk resonator, an ultra-high quality factor $\rm Q \sim 10^6$, accompanying an ultra-small effective mode volume, $\rm V_m \sim 10^{-2}$ $(λ/n)^3$ are achieved resulting in a Purcell factor of $\rm 10^6 (λ/n)^{-3}$ in the visible wavelength range. The toroidal dipole drives the electric and magnetic field concentration in the air gap with a generated vortex polarizing electric field. As an alternative to plasmonic and photonic crystal cavities, our study provides a more intriguing platform for engineering light-matter interaction to advance a plethora of fundamental studies and device applications, such as Purcell factor enhancement, room temperature strong coupling and nonlinear nanophotoncis.
Modulation of the optical index by means of atomic and material resonances provides a basis for controlling light propagation in natural and artificially fabricated materials. In addition, recent advances in the tuning of spatiotemporal couplings of ultrashort laser pulses have enabled almost arbitrary control over the group velocity of light. Here, using femtosecond time-resolved microscopy and numerical calculations, we investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of a surface plasmon polariton wave packet (SPP WP) that interacts with a plasmonic nanocavity. The nanocavity consists of metal-insul…
With their self-tuned time-varying responses, waveform-selective metasurfaces embedded with nonlinear electronics have shown fascinating applications, including distinguishing different electromagnetic waves depending on the pulse width. However, thus far they have only been realized with a spatially homogeneous scattering profile. Here, by modeling a metasurface as time-varying admittance sheets, we provide an analytical calculation method to predict the metasurface time-domain responses. This allows derivation of design specifications in the form of equivalent sheet admittance, which is usef…
Optical wave-based computing has enabled the realization of real-time information processing in both space and time domains. In the past few years, analog computing has experienced rapid development but mostly for a single function. Motivated by parallel space-time computing and miniaturization, we show that reconfigurable graphene-based metasurfaces offer a promising path towards spatiotemporal computing with integrated functionalities by properly engineering both spatial- and temporal-frequency responses. This paper employs a tunable graphene-based metasurface to enable analog signal and ima…
Dynamic optical metasurfaces with ultrafast temporal response, i.e., spatiotemporal optical metasurfaces, provide attractive solutions and open fascinating perspectives for modern highly integrated optics and photonics. In this work, electro-optically controlled optical metasurfaces operating in reflection and utilizing resonant waveguide mode excitation are demonstrated from the viewpoint of free-space propagating light modulation. The modulation of reflected light power with superior characteristics in comparison with prior research is achieved by identifying a suitable low-loss waveguide mo…
The ability to dynamically steer fs pulses from a monolithically integrated source is a critical milestone for the fields of nanophotonics and ultrafast optics. The nascent field of reconfigurable metasurfaces -- made of optically resonant meta-atoms -- has shown great promise in manipulating light-matter interactions through subwavelength control of the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light. These active metasurfaces arbitrarily transform an incident wavefront using a reconfigurable spatial phase profile and thus have been limited to manipulating coherent external sources. Light emittin…
Spatiotemporal Optical Vortices From All-Dielectric Bilayer Metagratings
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
