Abstract
One-way propagation of light, analogous to the directional flow of electrons in the presence of electric potential difference, has been an important goal in the wave–matter interaction. Breaking time-reversal symmetry in photonic flows is faced with challenges different from those for electron flows. In recent years several approaches and methods have been offered towards achieving this goal. Here we investigate another systematic approach to design all-passive relatively high-throughput metastructures that exhibit nonreciprocal properties and achieve wave-flow isolation. Moreover, we build on those findings and propose a paradigm for a quasi-two-dimensional metastructure that mimics the nonreciprocal property of Faraday rotation without using any magnetic or electric biasing. We envision that the proposed approaches may serve as a building block for all-passive time-reversal symmetry breaking with potential applications for future nonreciprocal systems and devices
Highlights
One-way propagation of light, analogous to the directional flow of electrons in the presence of electric potential difference, has been an important goal in the wave–matter interaction
Metastructures with gyrotropic properties exhibit time-reversal asymmetry and may be exploited for nonreciprocal propagation and transmission, for example, Faraday rotation of light polarization and asymmetric transmission for opposite directions of illumination—the latter is a property that is crucial for the electromagnetic wave isolation[18,19,20,21,22,23]
Many previous lines of work have proposed both theoretically and experimentally the concept of an electromagnetic diodes or isolators using nonlinearities30–42. This is in contrast with regular isolators, in which the backward signal is irretrievably ‘lost’, that is, is changed into either a different mode, a different frequency, dissipated or other modalities.) In some of these previous lines of work, it was shown that using a combination of nonlinearities and structural asymmetry it is possible to break the symmetry of wave transmission in forward and backward directions and acquire nonreciprocal behaviour
Summary
One-way propagation of light, analogous to the directional flow of electrons in the presence of electric potential difference, has been an important goal in the wave–matter interaction.
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