Topological phonon-polariton funneling in midinfrared metasurfaces.

Topological photonics offers enhanced control over electromagnetic fields by providing a platform for robust trapping and guiding of topological states of light. By combining the strong coupling between topological photons with phonons in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), we demonstrate a platform to control and guide hybrid states of light and lattice vibrations. The observed topological edge states of phonon-polaritons are found to carry nonzero angular momentum locked to their propagation direction, which enables their robust transport. Thus, these topological quasiparticles enable the funneling of infrared phonons mediated by helical infrared photons along arbitrary pathways and across sharp bends, thereby offering opportunities for applications ranging from Raman and vibrational spectroscopy with structured phonon-polaritons to directional heat dissipation.

Experimental demonstration of the microscopic origin of circular dichroism in two-dimensional metamaterials.

Optical activity and circular dichroism are fascinating physical phenomena originating from the interaction of light with chiral molecules or other nano objects lacking mirror symmetries in three-dimensional (3D) space. While chiral optical properties are weak in most of naturally occurring materials, they can be engineered and significantly enhanced in synthetic optical media known as chiral metamaterials, where the spatial symmetry of their building blocks is broken on a nanoscale. Although originally discovered in 3D structures, circular dichroism can also emerge in a two-dimensional (2D) metasurface. The origin of the resulting circular dichroism is rather subtle, and is related to non-radiative (Ohmic) dissipation of the constituent metamolecules. Because such dissipation occurs on a nanoscale, this effect has never been experimentally probed and visualized. Using a suite of recently developed nanoscale-measurement tools, we establish that the circular dichroism in a nanostructured metasurface occurs due to handedness-dependent Ohmic heating.

Real-Space Mapping of the Chiral Near-Field Distributions in Spiral Antennas and Planar Metasurfaces.

Chiral antennas and metasurfaces can be designed to react differently to left- and right-handed circularly polarized light, which enables novel optical properties such as giant optical activity and negative refraction. Here, we demonstrate that the underlying chiral near-field distributions can be directly mapped with scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy employing circularly polarized illumination. We apply our technique to visualize, for the first time, the circular-polarization selective nanofocusing of infrared light in Archimedean spiral antennas, and explain this chiral optical effect by directional launching of traveling waves in analogy to antenna theory. Moreover, we near-field image single-layer rosette and asymmetric dipole-monopole metasurfaces and find negligible and strong chiral optical near-field contrast, respectively. Our technique paves the way for near-field characterization of optical chirality in metal nanostructures, which will be essential for the future development of chiral antennas and metasurfaces and their applications.

Fano resonance between Mie and Bragg scattering in photonic crystals.

We report the observation of a Fano resonance between continuum Mie scattering and a narrow Bragg band in synthetic opal photonic crystals. The resonance leads to a transmission spectrum exhibiting a Bragg dip with an asymmetric profile, which can be tunably reversed to a Bragg rise. The Fano asymmetry parameter is linked with the dielectric contrast between the permittivity of the filler and the specific value determined by the opal matrix. The existence of the Fano resonance is directly related to disorder due to nonuniformity of a-SiO2 opal spheres. The theoretical "quasi-3D" model produces results in excellent agreement with the experimental data.

Reverse and enhanced magneto-optics of opal-garnet heterostructures.

Magnetophotonic heterostructures comprising two thin opal films and a layer of bismuth-substituted yttrium iron garnet were fabricated. Such heterostructures combined properties of 1D, 2D and 3D photonic crystals. Their spectra demonstrated various optical resonances resulting in reverse and enhanced magneto-optical responses.

Resonant behavior and selective switching of stop bands in three-dimensional photonic crystals with inhomogeneous components.

We demonstrate that, in contrast with the well-studied photonic crystals consisting of two homogeneous components, photonic crystals comprised of inhomogeneous or multiple (three or more) components may bring new opportunities to photonics due to the discovered quasiperiodic resonant behavior of their (hkl) stop bands as a function of the reciprocal lattice vector. A resonant stop band cannot be switched off for any permittivity of structural components. Tuning the permittivity or structural parameters allows the selective on-off switching of nonresonant (hkl) stop bands. This independent manipulation of light at different Bragg wavelengths provides a new degree of freedom to design selective optical switches and waveguides. Transmission experiments performed on synthetic opals confirmed the theoretical predictions.