2020/10/19 by Denis V. Novitsky, Denis Novitsky, Dmitry Lyakhov +6 · 4 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Metamaterial #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Nonlinear Photonic Systems #Nonlinear optics #Nonlinear system #Optical switch #Photonic crystal #Photonics #Power (physics) #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics #Simple (philosophy) #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41598-021-84271-0
published in Scientific Reports 11(1), 4790 (Nature Portfolio) · 8 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2020/10/19 · openalex created_date 2020/10/22 · openalex publication_date 2021/02/26 · arxiv updated 2021/03/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Unique and flexible properties of non-Hermitian photonic systems attract ever-increasing attention via delivering a whole bunch of novel optical effects and allowing for efficient tuning light-matter interactions on nano- and microscales. Together with an increasing demand for the fast and spatially compact methods of light governing, this peculiar approach paves a broad avenue to novel optical applications. Here, unifying the approaches of disordered metamaterials and non-Hermitian photonics, we propose a conceptually new and simple architecture driven by disordered loss-gain multilayers and, therefore, providing a powerful tool to control both the passage time and the wave-front shape of incident light with different switching times. For the first time we show the possibility to switch on and off kink formation by changing the level of disorder in the case of adiabatically raising wave fronts. At the same time, we deliver flexible tuning of the output intensity by using the nonlinear effect of loss and gain saturation. Since the disorder strength in our system can be conveniently controlled with the power of the external pump, our approach can be considered as a basis for different active photonic devices.