Papaioannou Maria, Plum Eric, Valente João, Rogers Edward Tf, Zheludev Nikolay I
Optoelectronics Research Centre and Centre for Photonic Metamaterials, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.
Institute for Life Sciences, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.
Light Sci Appl. 2016 Apr 22;5(4):e16070. doi: 10.1038/lsa.2016.70. eCollection 2016 Apr.
The ability to control the wavefront of light is fundamental to focusing and redistribution of light, enabling many applications from imaging to spectroscopy. Wave interaction on highly nonlinear photorefractive materials is essentially the only established technology allowing the dynamic control of the wavefront of a light beam with another beam of light, but it is slow and requires large optical power. Here we report a proof-of-principle demonstration of a new technology for two-dimensional (2D) control of light with light based on the coherent interaction of optical beams on highly absorbing plasmonic metasurfaces. We illustrate this by performing 2D all-optical logical operations (AND, XOR and OR) and image processing. Our approach offers diffraction-limited resolution, potentially at arbitrarily-low intensity levels and with 100 THz bandwidth, thus promising new applications in space-division multiplexing, adaptive optics, image correction, processing and recognition, 2D binary optical data processing and reconfigurable optical devices.
控制光的波前对于光的聚焦和重新分布至关重要，这使得从成像到光谱学等众多应用成为可能。光在高度非线性光折变材料上的相互作用本质上是唯一已确立的技术，它允许用另一束光对光束的波前进行动态控制，但这种方法速度慢且需要大功率的光。在此，我们报告了一种基于光束在高吸收性等离子体超表面上的相干相互作用实现光的二维（2D）控制的新技术的原理验证演示。我们通过执行二维全光逻辑运算（与、异或和或）以及图像处理来说明这一点。我们的方法提供了衍射极限分辨率，潜在地可在任意低的强度水平下实现，并且具有100太赫兹的带宽，因此有望在空分复用、自适应光学、图像校正、处理与识别、二维二进制光学数据处理以及可重构光学器件等方面有新的应用。
