Negative Refraction and Superresolution Using Transparent Metallo-Dielectric Stacks

Abstract

Negative refraction is known to occur in materials that simultaneously possess a negative electric permittivity and magnetic permeability; hence they are termed negative 2 index materials. However, there are no known natural materials that exhibit a negative index of refraction. In large part, interest in these materials is due to speculation that they could be used as perfect lenses with superresolution. We propose a new way of achieving negative refraction with currently available technology, based on transparent, metallodielectric multilayer structures. The advantage of these structures is that both tunability and transmission (well above 50%) can be achieved in the visible wavelength regime. We demonstrate both negative refraction and sub-wavelength resolution in these structures.Our findings point to a simpler way to fabricate a material that exhibits negative refraction.This opens up an entirely new path not only for negative refraction, but also to expand the exploration of wave propagation effects in metals.

Enhancement and inhibition of second-harmonic generation and absorption in a negative index cavity

“…implies that the forward-propagating signal at the fundamental frequency, which experiences negative refraction, is phase-matched to the backward-propagating signal at the second harmonic frequency, as described in ref. 11. Even with a relatively small damping coefficient, the high cavity-Q causes linear absorption losses to reach nearly 20% at the band edge.…”

Third-order nonlinear optical properties of metallodielectric stacks

“…With the FEM tool the interesting physics of photonic crystals can be studied to include open and closed aperture Z-scan geometries. Besides potential broad-band optical limiter applications [28] metallodielectric stacks have potential for super-resolving imaging properties [17,22,[29][30]. The FEM technique can be applied to these problems, as well, resolves the very memory intensive problem, by assuming axial symmetry scaling down the dimension of the problem from three to two.…”

Nonlinear Optics with Backward Waves: Extraordinary Features, Materials and Applications

“…Metal component imposes strong absorption of optical radiation in NIMs, which presents a major obstacle towards their numerous prospective exciting applications. Extraordinary features of coherent NLO frequency conversion processes in NIMs, which stem from wave-mixing of ordinary and backward electromagnetic waves (BEMWs), and the possibilities to apply them for compensating the outlined losses have been shown in [1][2][3][4][5] (for a review, see [6,7] and references therein). Most remarkable feature is appearance of distributed feedback NLO behavior.…”