Abstract
Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces, which emerged in the course of the last few decades, have revolutionized our understanding of light and light–matter interaction. While solid materials are naturally employed as key building elements for construction of optical metamaterials mainly due to their structural stability, practically no attention was given to study of liquid-made optical two-dimensional (2-D) metasurfaces and the underlying interaction regimes between surface optical modes and liquids. We theoretically demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons and slab waveguide modes that propagate within a thin liquid dielectric film trigger optical self-induced interaction facilitated by surface tension effects, which leads to the formation of 2-D optical liquid-made lattices/metasurfaces with tunable symmetry and can be leveraged for tuning of lasing modes. Furthermore, we show that the symmetry breaking of the 2-D optical liquid lattice leads to phase transition and tuning of its topological properties, which allows the formation, destruction, and movement of Dirac-points in the k-space. Our results indicate that optical liquid lattices support extremely low lasing threshold relative to solid dielectric films and have the potential to serve as configurable analogous computation platform.
Highlights
Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces, which emerged in the course of the last few decades, have revolutionized our understanding of light and light–matter interaction
Recent studies introduced a novel interaction between surface plasmon polariton (SPP) and a thin liquid dielectric (TLD) film due to geometrical changes of the gas–fluid interface facilitated by the thermocapillary (TC) effect: theoretical study of self-induced focusing and defocusing effects of propagating SPPs due to nonlocal interaction[36] as well as formation of an optical liquid lattice of a fixed square symmetry, and experimental demonstration of TC-assisted optical tuning of surface plasmon resonance coupling angle.[37]
We theoretically demonstrate that SPPs or slab waveguide (WG) modes propagating in a TLD film, which is thinner than the penetration depth of the corresponding surface optical mode in the direction normal to the film’s surface, lead to a nonlocal and nonlinear response of the corresponding dielectric function due to optically driven surface tension effects
Summary
Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces, which emerged in the course of the last few decades, have revolutionized our understanding of light and light–matter interaction. Since both surface tension effects are accompanied by flows and deformation of the TLD film, the latter lead to self-induced changes of the dielectric function that are coupled back to the propagation conditions of the surface optical mode.
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