Excitonic Metamaterials with Electric and Magnetic Tunability
Abstract
Project SummaryApproved for Public ReleaseSilicon and other III-V materials have proven to be a valuable platform for both photonic,and optoelectronic devices. However, the performance of silicon photonics is limited because of silicon s inability to conf, on the nanometer scale, and silicon struggles to actively control light since its optical properties aren t highly tunable to exter,nal stimuli such as electric and magnetic fields. Using III-V semiconductors instead of silicon gives improvements in both efficienc,y and tunability, but III-V semiconductors only incrementally improve photonic and optoelectronic devices when used at room temperat,ure. Silicon Nitride based photonics are another mature platform, but they struggle from tunability7 limiting its application to pas,sive structures and optical components. Therefore, the fields of photonics and optoelectronics can go through transformative advance,s in materials and techniques that can confine light into deep subwavelength thicknesses making it easy to control photon properties, (e.g. amplitude, phase, polarization, angular momentum) and have tunability of those properties that allow for active control of li,avenues in design of fundamentally novel class off active-metamaterials. One widely studied technique to confining light on the nano,meter scale has been to use plasmons, but their epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) property results in large, unavoidable losses. Also, plasmon,s typically aren t sensitive to external electric and magnetic fields preventing them from actively controlling light without the ai,d of other materials. To address the above challenges, the overall objective of the proposed research is to explore the use,of excitons and their tunability to realize a new class of metamaterials hereafter referred to as excitonic metamaterials in the v,isible to near infra-red (NIR) wavelength range. The proposed excitonic metamaterials will be designed and developed from basic elec,tromagnetic wave theory by engineering of dispersion of exciton as it couples to photons in a material at various linear and angular, momenta. By varying the material type, thickness and composition, we will demonstrate tuning or engineering of this dispersion rela,tion of excitons all the way from pure excitons to fully hybridized exciton-polaritons. While numerous studies have been performed o,n exciton-polaritons in the past, our proposed metamaterials are unique since they will sustain self-hybridized exciton-polaritons a,nd will therefore not require an external cavity medium. This makes our proposed metamaterials unique, opening a new direction in op,tical dispersion engineering using exciton as the fundamental exciton for mode engineering as opposed to plasmon in the otherwise fa,mous plasmonic metamaterials. In addition, to the fundamental novelty of using exciton mode foroptical dispersion engineering, we al,so propose to use both the passive and active tunability of excitons in quantum confined, low-dimensional semiconductor systems to a,chieve a large tuning of the exciton-polariton coupling from the weak-coupling to the strong-coupling regime to the ultra-strong cou,pling regime. Finally, we propose to introduce active tuning of the excitons and hence exciton-polariton dispersion via applied elec,rsion engineering has been scarce. Further, by introducing coupling of exciton-polaritons to ferro and anti-ferromagnetic spin-order, in materials which can then be tuned via applied magnetic fields and strains, we propose to demonstrate and open a whole new regime, of light-matter interactions and tunable metamaterials.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 06, 2022
- Source ID
- N000142312037
Entities
People
- Deep Jariwala
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Pennsylvania