Tunable Bloch surface waves in anisotropic photonic crystals based on lithium niobate thin films

Abstract

We present an original type of one-dimensional photonic crystal that includes one anisotropic layer made of a lithium niobate thin film. We demonstrate the versatility of such a device sustaining different Bloch surface waves (BSWs), depending on the orientation of the incident wave. By varying the orientation of the illumination of the multilayer, we measured an angle variation of 7° between the BSWs corresponding to the extraordinary and the ordinary index of the lithium niobate thin film. The potential of such a platform opens the way to novel tunable and active planar optics based on the electro- and thermo-optical properties of lithium niobate.

Bloch surface waves at the telecommunication wavelength with lithium niobate as the top layer for integrated optics

“…With the aim of finding new optical functionalities various materials have been used for multilayers and the top (device) layer. For example Ta2O5/SiO2 [2,30], SiO2/Si3N4 [10], TiO2 [9], graphene [23,31], ZnS [32], MoS2 [33] and LiNbO3 [34].…”

Bloch Surface Waves Using Graphene Layers: An Approach toward In-Plane Photodetectors

“…They include waveguides [16,17], lenses [5,18], disk resonators [19,20], BSW reflectors [21], Bessel-like beams [22][23][24][25], subwavelength focusers [26], phase-shifted Bragg gratings [27] and grating couplers [28,29]. Moreover, tunable planar optical components on BSW platforms have been demonstrated [30,31]. However, to envision BSW-based 2D integrated optical systems, detectors and light sources are inevitable elements to be studied.…”

Photonic Crystal-Supported Long-Range Surface Plasmon-Polaritons Propagating Along High-Quality Silver Nanofilms

“…This topic is relatively far from the research under discussion now, but for completeness, we still would like to indicate a few corresponding essential papers and reviews [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], see further references therein.…”