Trapping light by mimicking gravitational lensing

Abstract

One of the most fascinating predictions of the theory of general relativity is the effect of gravitational lensing, the bending of light in close proximity to massive stellar objects. Recently, artificial optical materials have been proposed to study the various aspects of curved spacetimes, including light trapping and Hawking's radiation. However, the development of experimental toy models that simulate gravitational lensing in curved spacetimes remains a challenge, especially for visible light. Here, by utilizing a microstructured optical waveguide around a microsphere, we propose to mimic curved spacetimes caused by gravity, with high precision. We experimentally demonstrate both far-field gravitational lensing effects and the critical phenomenon in close proximity to the photon sphere of astrophysical objects under hydrostatic equilibrium. The proposed microstructured waveguide can be used as an omnidirectional absorber, with potential light harvesting and microcavity applications.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures. This work is published at Nature Photonics, Published online: 29 September 201

Lithographically Fabricated Magnifying Maxwell Fisheye Lenses

“…The fabricated TO designs are broadband, which was verified in the 488-633 nm wavelength range. Our technique together with other related results [9][10][11] opens up an additional degree of freedom in optical design and considerably improves our ability to manipulate light on submicrometer scale. In particular, it enables extremely compact and efficient waveguide mode sorters, which are required in on-chip mode-division multiplexing and sensing applications.…”

Structure-Induced Ultratransparency in Photonic Crystals

“…It is interesting to note that the omnidirectional perfect transparency and elliptical EFCs of the ultratransparent media are essential for ideal TO devices. The theory of TO [23][24][25][26][27] promises many novel and interesting applications, such as invisibility cloaks [23,25,31,32], concentrators [33], illusion optics devices [34][35][36], and simulations of cosmic phenomena [37,38]. Generally, the TO devices are realized by using metamaterials [14][15][16][17][18][19][20], which require complicated designs of electric and magnetic resonances, hindering the realization and applications in practice.…”

Wiggly cosmic string as a waveguide for massless and massive fields

“…Recently, artificial optical materials (metamaterials) have been proposed as a way to mimic aspects of curved spacetime in the laboratory. For instance, by manipulating the effective refractive index of the medium, Sheng et al 34 were able to reproduce gravitational lensing and trapping of light (see also 35 ). Incidentally, electronic metamaterials may also be used to simulate peculiar spacetime conditions, like a discontinuous Lorentzian to Kleinian metric signature change 36 which has also been modeled by optical metamaterials 37 .…”