Optical surface waves in periodic layered media

A generalized analysis of wave propagation in periodic layered media is applied to the special case of optical surface waves. These waves, confined to the interface between a periodic layered medium and a homogeneous medium, are formally analogous to electronic surface states in crystals. Single-mode surface-wave propagation along the surface of a GaAs-AlGaAs multilayer stack (grown by molecular-beam epitaxy) has been observed experimentally

Electromagnetic propagation in periodic stratified media. I. General theory

The propagation of electromagnetic radiation in periodically stratified media is considered. Media of finite, semi-infinite, and infinite extent are treated. A diagonalization of the unit cell translation operator is used to obtain exact solutions for the Bloch waves, the dispersion relations, and the band structure of the medium. Some new phenomena with applications to integrated optics and laser technology are presented

Diffraction efficiency of strong volume holograms

We investigate the diffraction efficiency of strong volume holograms in which the coupling parameter is several times that needed for maximum diffraction efficiency. We discuss the implications of our findings on photorefractive implementations of various neural network systems

Dynamics of grating formation in photovoltaic media

The Kukhtarev equations are solved taking into account the photovoltaic effect and different boundary conditions. In the case of open circuit, the voltage across the crystal is found to vary with a time scale similar to the photorefractive time constant. This effect explains the dynamic behavior observed experimentally

Stark-Induced Optical Nonlinearity in Gaseous NH₂D and Optical Waves in Layered Media

The first part of this work describes theoretical and experimental studies of Stark-induced three-wave mixing in gaseous NH2D. Application of a dc electric field to a gaseous system destroys the basic inversion symmetry and allows two-photon mixing processes to occur. A theoretical derivation of this effect under conditions of resonantly enhanced non-linearities is given for a three-level system. Calculations are presented for mixing of a CO2 laser with a 4 GHz microwaves in the molecule NH2D, producing single lower sideband radiation. Experimental observation of resonantly enhanced, dc-induced, three-wave mixing in gaseous NH2D is presented. The dependence of this effect on gas pressure, microwave frequency, applied dc field, and microwave power are presented and compared with theoretical predictions. The experiment was done at Hughes Research Laboratories by Abrams and his coworkers. The second part of this work describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves in periodic layered media. The propagation of electromagnetic radiation in periodically stratified media is considered. Media of finite, semi-finite and infinite extent are treated. A diagonalization of the unit cell translation operator is used to obtain exact solutions for the Bloch waves, the dispersion relations, and the band structure of the medium. The theory of electromagnetic Bloch waves in periodic stratified media is then applied to the problems of birefringence, and group velocity in these media. The relevance of periodic media to phase matching in nonlinear mixing experiments-and to laser action in the x-ray region is discussed. New types of guided waves such as Bragg guided waves and optical surface waves are theoretically predicted and experimentally observed.</p

Phase-locked sustainment of photorefractive holograms using phase conjugation

A method for sustaining multiply exposed photorefractive holograms, in a phase-locked fashion, by using a pair of phase-conjugating mirrors is described. It is shown that a steady state exists where the overall diffraction efficiency is independent of the number of holographic exposures and the final holograms are exactly in phase with the initial ones. Both analytical and experimental results are presented

Retrieval of material parameters for uniaxial metamaterials

We present a general method for retrieving the effective tensorial permittivity of any uniaxially anisotropic metamaterial. By relaxing the usually imposed condition of non-magnetic metal/dielectric metamaterials, we also retrieve the permeability tensor and show that hyperbolic metamaterials exhibit a strong diamagnetic response in the visible regime. We obtain global material parameters, directly measurable with spectroscopic ellipsometry and distinguishable from mere wave parameters, by using the generalized dispersion equation for uniaxial crystals along with existing homogenization methods. Our method is analytically and experimentally verified for Ag/SiO2 planar metamaterials with varying number of layers and compared to the effective medium theory. We also propose an experimental method for retrieving material parameters using methods other than ellipsometry.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Frozen light in periodic stacks of anisotropic layers

We consider a plane electromagnetic wave incident on a periodic stack of dielectric layers. One of the alternating layers has an anisotropic refractive index with an oblique orientation of the principal axis relative to the normal to the layers. It was shown recently (A. Figotin and I. Vitebskiy, Phys. Rev. E68, 036609 2003) that an obliquely incident light, upon entering such a periodic stack, can be converted into an abnormal axially frozen mode with drastically enhanced amplitude and zero normal component of the group velocity. The stack reflectivity at this point can be very low, implying nearly total conversion of the incident light into the frozen mode with huge energy density, compared to that of the incident light. Supposedly, the frozen mode regime requires strong birefringence in the anisotropic layers - by an order of magnitude stronger than that available in common anisotropic dielectric materials. In this paper we show how to overcome the above problem by exploiting higher frequency bands of the photonic spectrum. We prove that a robust frozen mode regime at optical wavelengths can be realized in stacks composed of common anisotropic materials, such as YVO&#8324;, LiNb, CaCO&#8323;, and the like.Comment: to be submitted to Phys. Rev.

Mimicking surface polaritons for unpolarized light with high-permittivity materials

Tailoring near-field optical phenomena often requires excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) or surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs), surface waves at the interface between media with electric permittivities of opposite sign. Despite their unprecedented field confinement, surface polaritons are limited by polarization: only transverse magnetic fields enable their excitation, leaving transverse electric fields unexploited. By contrast, guided modes in positive permittivity materials occur for both linear polarizations, however, they typically cannot compete with SPPs and SPhPs in terms of confinement. Here we show that omnipolarization guided modes in materials with high-permittivity resonances can reach confinement factors similar to SPPs and SPhPs, while surpassing them in terms of propagation distance. We explore the cases of silicon carbide and transition-metal dichalcogenides near their permittivity resonances, and compare with SPhPs in silicon carbide and SPPs in silver, at infrared and visible frequencies, respectively