2015/07/10 by Alessandro Ciattoni, Carlo Rizza, Ciattoni, Alessandro +9
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Coupling (piping) #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials science #Mathematical physics #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Nonlinear system #Optics (physics.optics) #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Philosophy #Physics #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Zero (linguistics) #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1507.02926
8 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2015/07/10 · openalex publication_date 2015/07/10 · arxiv updated 2015/07/13 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In recent years, unconventional metamaterial properties have triggered a revolution of electromagnetic research which has unveiled novel scenarios of wave-matter interaction. A very small dielectric permittivity is a leading example of such unusual features, since it produces an exotic static-like regime where the electromagnetic field is spatially slowly-varying over a physically large region. The so-called epsilon-near-zero metamaterials thus offer an ideal platform where to manipulate the inner details of the "stretched" field. Here we theoretically prove that a standard nonlinearity is able to operate such a manipulation to the point that even a thin slab produces a dramatic nonlinear pulse transformation, if the dielectric permittivity is very small within the field bandwidth. The predicted non-resonant releasing of full nonlinear coupling produced by the epsilon-near-zero condition does not resort to any field enhancement mechanisms and opens novel routes to exploiting matter nonlinearity for steering the radiation by means of ultra-compact structures.