Ginzburg P, Rodríguez Fortuño F J, Wurtz G A, Dickson W, Murphy A, Morgan F, Pollard R J, Iorsh I, Atrashchenko A, Belov P A, Kivshar Y S, Nevet A, Ankonina G, Orenstein M, Zayats A V
Department of Physics, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Opt Express. 2013 Jun 17;21(12):14907-17. doi: 10.1364/OE.21.014907.
One of the basic functionalities of photonic devices is the ability to manipulate the polarization state of light. Polarization components are usually implemented using the retardation effect in natural birefringent crystals and, thus, have a bulky design. Here, we have demonstrated the polarization manipulation of light by employing a thin subwavelength slab of metamaterial with an extremely anisotropic effective permittivity tensor. Polarization properties of light incident on the metamaterial in the regime of hyperbolic, epsilon-near-zero, and conventional elliptic dispersions were compared. We have shown that both reflection from and transmission through λ/20 thick slab of the metamaterial may provide nearly complete linear-to-circular polarization conversion or 90° linear polarization rotation, not achievable with natural materials. Using ellipsometric measurements, we experimentally studied the polarization conversion properties of the metamaterial slab made of the plasmonic nanorod arrays in different dispersion regimes. We have also suggested all-optical ultrafast control of reflected or transmitted light polarization by employing metal nonlinearities.
光子器件的基本功能之一是能够操纵光的偏振态。偏振组件通常利用天然双折射晶体中的延迟效应来实现，因此设计较为庞大。在此，我们通过采用具有极各向异性有效介电常数张量的超薄超材料亚波长平板，展示了对光的偏振操纵。比较了在双曲线、近零介电常数和传统椭圆色散 regime 下入射到超材料上的光的偏振特性。我们已经表明，来自该超材料 λ/20 厚平板的反射和透射都可以提供近乎完全的线偏振到圆偏振转换或 90°线偏振旋转，这是天然材料无法实现的。利用椭偏测量，我们通过实验研究了由等离子体纳米棒阵列制成的超材料平板在不同色散 regime 下的偏振转换特性。我们还提出了通过利用金属非线性对反射或透射光的偏振进行全光超快控制。
