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 terahertz-bandwidth light-by-light modulators.
Highlights
In 1678, Christiaan Huygens stipulated that ‘...light beams traveling in different and even opposite directions pass though one another without mutual disturbance’[1] and in the framework of classical electrodynamics, this superposition principle remains unchallenged for electromagnetic waves interacting in vacuum or inside an extended medium.[2]
Since the invention of the laser, colossal effort has been focused on the study and development of intense laser sources and nonlinear media for controlling light with light, from the initial search for optical bistability[3] to recent quests for all-optical data networking and silicon photonic circuits
Due to the presence of a substrate and to fabrication-related asymmetry/imperfection of the slots milled into the gold film, it shows differing levels of absorption (34% and 57%) for the two opposing propagation directions; Second, the metamaterial is very thin it does have a finite thickness of l/13; and the laser source is not perfectly coherent—its emission includes an incoherent
Summary
In 1678, Christiaan Huygens stipulated that ‘...light beams traveling in different and even opposite directions pass though one another without mutual disturbance’[1] and in the framework of classical electrodynamics, this superposition principle remains unchallenged for electromagnetic waves interacting in vacuum or inside an extended medium.[2]. Interactions of light with nanoscale objects provide some leeway for violation of the linear superposition principle. This is possible through the use of coherent interactions, which have been successfully engaged in applications ranging from phased array antennas to the manipulation of light distributions and quantum states of matter.[4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Consider a thin light-absorbing film of sub-wavelength thickness: the interference of two counter-propagating incident beams A and B on such a film is described by two limiting cases illustrated in Figure 1: in the first, a standing wave is formed with a zero-field node at the position of the absorbing film. If the film is located at an antinode of the standing wave, blocking beam B will result in a
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