Controlling light-with-light without nonlinearity
Controlling light-with-light without nonlinearity
According to Huygens' superposition principle, light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance. Indeed, it is widely held that controlling light signals with light requires intense laser fields to facilitate beam interactions in nonlinear media, where the superposition principle can be broken. We demonstrate here that two coherent beams of light of arbitrarily low intensity can interact on a metamaterial layer of nanoscale thickness in such a way that one beam modulates the intensity of the other. We show that the interference of beams can eliminate the plasmonic Joule losses of light energy in the metamaterial or, in contrast, can lead to almost total absorption of light. Applications of this phenomenon may lie in ultrafast all-optical pulse-recovery devices, coherence filters and THz-bandwidth light-by-light modulators.
1-5
Zhang, Jianfa
7ce15288-2016-4b9c-8244-7aed073363ca
MacDonald, Kevin F.
76c84116-aad1-4973-b917-7ca63935dba5
Zheludev, Nikolay I.
32fb6af7-97e4-4d11-bca6-805745e40cc6
6 July 2012
Zhang, Jianfa
7ce15288-2016-4b9c-8244-7aed073363ca
MacDonald, Kevin F.
76c84116-aad1-4973-b917-7ca63935dba5
Zheludev, Nikolay I.
32fb6af7-97e4-4d11-bca6-805745e40cc6
Zhang, Jianfa, MacDonald, Kevin F. and Zheludev, Nikolay I.
(2012)
Controlling light-with-light without nonlinearity.
Light: Science & Applications, 1, , [e18].
(doi:10.1038/lsa.2012.18).
Abstract
According to Huygens' superposition principle, light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance. Indeed, it is widely held that controlling light signals with light requires intense laser fields to facilitate beam interactions in nonlinear media, where the superposition principle can be broken. We demonstrate here that two coherent beams of light of arbitrarily low intensity can interact on a metamaterial layer of nanoscale thickness in such a way that one beam modulates the intensity of the other. We show that the interference of beams can eliminate the plasmonic Joule losses of light energy in the metamaterial or, in contrast, can lead to almost total absorption of light. Applications of this phenomenon may lie in ultrafast all-optical pulse-recovery devices, coherence filters and THz-bandwidth light-by-light modulators.
Text
lsa201218
- Version of Record
More information
Published date: 6 July 2012
Organisations:
Optoelectronics Research Centre
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 341317
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/341317
PURE UUID: ae8b9b15-06ed-4ef9-941f-24c1379a2102
Catalogue record
Date deposited: 19 Jul 2012 10:13
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:03
Export record
Altmetrics
Contributors
Author:
Jianfa Zhang
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.
View more statistics
