Extremely high-Q quasi-BICs induced by simultaneously broken out-of- and in-plane symmetries in dielectric metasurfaces of low-index materials

Abstract

Generating high-Q resonances is a difficult task to realize with low-index materials as the building blocks of metasurfaces, despite of its significance. Up to date, various schemes for obtaining strong resonances with low-index materials have been reported, while the highest record of Q-factor still remains in the order of several thousands. This work shows that quasi-bound states in the continuum (quasi-BICs) with extremely high Q-factors in the orders of 105∼107 can be obtained in the low-index metasurfaces, taking lithium niobate (LN) metasurfaces supported by silica substrate as examples. In such metasurfaces, BICs with inversion symmetric distributions evolve to quasi-BICs with extremely high Q-factors by simultaneously breaking out-of- and in-plane symmetries due to multiple symmetry protectedness. Dramatically high enhancement of mode intensity in the order of 104∼106 due to the high Q-factor enables highly efficient nonlinear frequency conversion: the results based on the self-consistent approach show that the total efficiency of second-harmonic generation reaches around 9.4% for pump intensity of 0.5 W/cm2. As the first report on extremely high-Q quasi-BICs in low-index metasurfaces, the presented results pave the way towards broad applications for ultraviolet nanophotonics.