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Controlling light

Controlling light
Controlling light
According to the fundamental Huygens superposition principle, light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance. Indeed, the field of photonics is based on the premise that controlling light signals with light requires intense laser fields to facilitate beam interactions in nonlinear media, where the superposition principle can be broken. Here we challenge this wisdom and demonstrate 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.
Zheludev, N.I.
32fb6af7-97e4-4d11-bca6-805745e40cc6
Zhang, J.
7ce15288-2016-4b9c-8244-7aed073363ca
MacDonald, K.F.
76c84116-aad1-4973-b917-7ca63935dba5
Zheludev, N.I.
32fb6af7-97e4-4d11-bca6-805745e40cc6
Zhang, J.
7ce15288-2016-4b9c-8244-7aed073363ca
MacDonald, K.F.
76c84116-aad1-4973-b917-7ca63935dba5

Zheludev, N.I., Zhang, J. and MacDonald, K.F. (2012) Controlling light. Metamaterials 2012, St Petersburg, Russian Federation. 16 - 21 Sep 2012.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)

Abstract

According to the fundamental Huygens superposition principle, light beams traveling in a linear medium will pass though one another without mutual disturbance. Indeed, the field of photonics is based on the premise that controlling light signals with light requires intense laser fields to facilitate beam interactions in nonlinear media, where the superposition principle can be broken. Here we challenge this wisdom and demonstrate 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.

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More information

Published date: 2012
Venue - Dates: Metamaterials 2012, St Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2012-09-16 - 2012-09-21
Organisations: Optoelectronics Research Centre

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 376010
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/376010
PURE UUID: d485d4ef-c1e2-49bc-8f7d-4566adedd49f
ORCID for N.I. Zheludev: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-1013-6636
ORCID for K.F. MacDonald: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3877-2976

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 22 Apr 2015 14:18
Last modified: 12 Dec 2021 03:09

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Contributors

Author: N.I. Zheludev ORCID iD
Author: J. Zhang
Author: K.F. MacDonald ORCID iD

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