Analog optical computing by half-wavelength slabs

Abstract

A new approach to perform analog optical differentiation is presented using half-wavelength slabs. First, a half-wavelength dielectric slab is used to design a first order differentiator. The latter works properly for both major polarizations, in contrast to our previously design based on Brewster effect (Youssefi et al., 2016). Inspired by the proposed dielectric differentiator, and by exploiting the unique features of graphene, we further design and demonstrate a reconfigurable and highly miniaturized differentiator using a half-wavelength plasmonic graphene film. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed graphene-based differentiator is even smaller than the most compact differentiator presented so far.