Subdiffraction confinement in dielectric waveguide with extreme anisotropy

Abstract

All-dielectric slab waveguide filling the core with metamaterials of extreme anisotropy realizes the light transport being confined in a subdiffraction region with substantial energy concentration. The extreme anisotropy makes the evanescent waves in the claddings decay faster and the guided mode tightly localized in the core. Furthermore, the cutoff width can be decoupled from the group velocity of the mode, it can reach zero in the limit of extreme anisotropy but still sustain considerable group velocity. We analyze technically realizable cases and conclude that our work can contribute to improvements of various electromagnetic devices, from visible to microwave frequency regions.