A light
beam’s frequency can blueshift when the beam travels
through a medium that exhibits a time-dependent decrease in the refractive
index. Here we show that a metasurface made of a plasmonic antenna
array on a thin indium tin oxide (ITO), which exhibits epsilon-near-zero
(ENZ) response, can behave as a time-varying medium and change the
frequency of a sufficiently strong light beam through self-action
effect. Specifically, we observe that a near-resonant optical excitation
of the 92 nm thick metasurface leads to an intensity-dependent blueshift
of the excitation pulse. We measured a maximum blueshift of ∼1.6
THz with ∼4 GW/cm2 incident intensity. The observed
effect using an ITO-based ENZ metasurface has an energy requirement
that is up to 200× lower than implementations using ITO alone.
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