Disorder-Immune Photonics Based on Mie-Resonant Dielectric Metamaterials

Abstract

Modern nanotechnology provides tools for realizing unique photonic structures with the feature size comparable or even smaller than the wavelength of light. However, the fabrication imperfections at the nanoscale inevitably introduce disorder that affects or even destroys many functionalities of subwavelength photonic devices. Here we suggest a novel concept to achieve a robust bandgap which can endure disorder beyond 30% as a result of the transition from photonic crystals to Mie-resonant metamaterials. We demonstrate photonic waveguides and cavities with strong robustness to position disorder. Utilizing Mie-resonant metamaterials with high refractive index provides an alternative approach to the bandgap-based nanophotonic devices instead of harnessing the fabrication precision, and also brings new functionalities.

Integration of periodic, sub‐wavelength structures in silicon‐on‐insulator photonic device design

“…We therefore speculate that disorder induces a higher fabrication tolerance by effectively smearing the band structure around the absorption peaks to increase the bandwidth of the pseudogap effect. Similar disorder has been observed in designs that demonstrate an improved fabrication tolerance [72, 87, 99] as compared to regular periodic perturbations. This has been further verified by computational optimisation techniques for nanophotonic device design.…”