Title: Broadband surface-wave transformation cloak

Abstract

Guiding surface electromagnetic waves around disorder without disturbing the wave amplitude or phase is in great demand for modern photonic and plasmonic devices, but is fundamentally difficult to realize because light momentum must be conserved in a scattering event. A partial realization has been achieved by exploiting topological electromagnetic surface states, but this approach is limited to narrow-band light transmission and subject to phase disturbances in the presence of disorder. Recent advances in transformation optics apply principles of general relativity to curve the space for light, allowing one to match the momentum and phase of light around any disorder as if that disorder were not there. This feature has been exploited in the development of invisibility cloaks. An ideal invisibility cloak, however, would require the phase velocity of light being guided around the cloaked object to exceed the vacuum speed of light—a feat potentially achievable only over an extremely narrow band. In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally show that the bottlenecks encountered in previous studies can be overcome. We introduce a class of cloaks capable of remarkable broadband surface electromagnetic waves guidance around ultrasharp corners and bumps with no perceptible changes in amplitude and phase. These cloaks consist ofmore » specifically designed nonmagnetic metamaterials and achieve nearly ideal transmission efficiency over a broadband frequency range from 0⁺ to 6 GHz. Finally, this work provides strong support for the application of transformation optics to plasmonic circuits and could pave the way toward high-performance, large-scale integrated photonic circuits.« less

Authors:

Xu, Su ^[1]; Xu, Hongyi ^[2]; Gao, Hanhong ^[3]; Jiang, Yuyu ^[1]; Yu, Faxin ^[1]; Joannopoulos, John D. ^[3]; Soljačić, Marin ^[3]; Chen, Hongsheng ^[4]; Sun, Handong ^[2]; Zhang, Baile ^[2]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou (China)
2. Nanyang Technological Univ. (Singapore)
3. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
4. Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou (China); Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)

Publication Date:

Mon Jun 08 00:00:00 EDT 2015

Research Org.:

Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) (United States). Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S3TEC)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)

OSTI Identifier:

1347983

Grant/Contract Number:  

SC0001299

Resource Type:

Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Volume: 112; Journal Issue: 25; Journal ID: ISSN 0027-8424

Publisher:

National Academy of Sciences

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS; 70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY; transformation optics; surface wave; invisibility cloaks; broadband