An Archimedes' screw for light

An Archimedes’ Screw captures water, feeding energy into it by lifting it to a higher level. We introduce the first instance of an optical Archimedes’ Screw, and demonstrate how this system is capable of capturing light, dragging it and amplifying it. We unveil new exact analytic solutions to Maxwell’s Equations for a wide family of chiral space-time media, and show their potential to achieve chirally selective amplification within widely tunable parity-time-broken phases. Our work, which may be readily implemented via pump-probe experiments with circularly polarized beams, opens a new direction in the physics of time-varying media by merging the rising field of space-time metamaterials and that of chiral systems, and offers a new playground for topological and non-Hermitian photonics, with potential applications to chiral spectroscopy and sensing

Broadband tunable THz absorption with singular graphene metasurfaces

By exploiting singular spatial modulations of the graphene conductivity, we design a broadband, tunable THz absorber whose efficiency approaches the theoretical upper bound for a wide absorption band with a fractional bandwidth of 185%. Strong field enhancement is exhibited by the modes of this extended structure, which is able to excite a wealth of high-order surface plasmons, enabling deeply subwavelength focusing of incident THz radiation. Previous studies have shown that the conductivity can be modulated at GHz frequencies, which might lead to the development of efficient high-speed broadband switching by an atomically thin layer

Singular Graphene Metasurfaces

The spatial tunability of the electron density in graphene enables the dynamic engineering of metasurfaces in the form of conductivity gratings, which can bridge the momentum gap between incident radiation and surface plasmons. Here, we discuss singular graphene metasurfaces, whose conductivity is strongly suppressed at the grating valleys. By analytically characterising their plasmonic response via transformation optics, we first review the physical principles underlying these structures, which were recently found to exhibit broadband, tunable THz absorption. We characterise the spectrum with different common substrates and then move to study in further detail how conductivity gratings may be finely tuned by placing an array of charged gold nanowires at sub-micron distance from the graphene

Eigenpulses of dispersive time-varying media

We develop a compact theory that can be applied to a variety of time-varying dispersive materials. The continuous wave reflection and transmission coefficients are replaced with equivalent operator expressions. In addition to comparing this approach to existing numerical and analytical techniques, we find that the eigenfunctions of these operators represent pulses that do not change their spectra after interaction with the time-varying, dispersive material. In addition, the poles of these operators represent the non-time harmonic bound states of the system.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Gain in time dependent media - a new mechanism

Time dependent systems do not in general conserve energy invalidating much of the theory developed for static systems and turning our intuition on its head. This is particularly acute in luminal space time crystals where the structure moves at or close to the velocity of light. Conventional Bloch wave theory no longer applies, energy grows exponentially with time, and a new perspective is required to understand the phenomenology. In this letter we identify a new mechanism for amplification: the compression of lines of force that are nevertheless conserved in number

Photon localisation and Bloch symmetry breaking in luminal gratings

In gratings travelling at nearly the velocity of light a symmetry breaking transition is observed between free-flowing fluid-like Bloch waves observed at lower grating velocities and, at luminal velocities, condensed, localised states of light captured in each period of the grating and locked to its velocity. We introduce a new technique for calculating in this regime and use it to study the transition in detail shedding light on the critical exponents, and the periodic oscillations in transmitted intensity seen in the pre-transition regime.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Fresnel drag in space-time-modulated metamaterials

A moving medium drags light along with it as measured by Fizeau and explained by Einstein's theory of special relativity. Here we show that the same effect can be obtained in a situation where there is no physical motion of the medium. Modulations of both the permittivity and permeability, phased in space and time in the form of travelling waves, are the basis of our model. Space-time metamaterials are represented by effective bianisotropic parameters, which can in turn be mapped to a moving homogeneous medium. Hence these metamaterials mimic a relativistic effect without the need for any actual material motion. We discuss how both the permittivity and permeability need to be modulated in order to achieve these effects, and we present an equivalent transmission line model

Probing graphene’s nonlocality with singular metasurfaces

Singular graphene metasurfaces, conductivity gratings realized by periodically suppressing the local doping level of a graphene sheet, were recently proposed to efficiently harvest THz light and couple it to surface plasmons over broad absorption bands, thereby achieving remarkably high field enhancement. However, the large momentum wavevectors thus attained are sensitive to the nonlocal behavior of the underlying electron liquid. Here, we extend the theory of singular graphene metasurfaces to account for the full nonlocal optical response of graphene and discuss the resulting impact on the plasmon resonance spectrum. Finally, we propose a simple local-analogue model that is able to reproduce the effect of nonlocality in local-response calculations by introducing a constant conductivity offset, which could prove a valuable tool in the modeling of more complex experimental graphene-based platforms