KEYWORDS: Optical vortices, Structured light, Diffraction, Chemical species, Quantum dots, Absorption, Gaussian beams, Scanning electron microscopy, Linear polarizers, Scientific research
Optical beams with Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) can potentially be used to probe forbidden transitions. However, the size of the vortex beam has to be comparable to that of an atom, molecule or an artificial atom. We propose and demonstrate a de-magnifying hyperlens allowing reducing the size of the vortex beam to the nanometer scale.
Hyperlens was already shown to facilitate the sub-diffraction imaging in the far-field by converting the sub-wavelength information carried by evanescent wave components into the propagating waves and magnifying those sub-wavelength details to the scales that can be resolved by conventional optical components. In this talk, we will discuss the case when the hyperlens is used in a reverse way, such that the incident light enters on the outer surface of the hyperlens and collected on the inner surface, the device may function as a de-magnifier. In particular, if a pattern of a large size (above the diffraction limit) is recorded on the outer surface serving as a mask, the sub-wavelength image can be achieved on the inner side of the hyperlens. While this idea was validated using numerical simulations, no experimental demonstration was reported to date.
In this talk, we demonstrate de-magnifying hyperlens in laboratory experiments and discuss its potential applications. For example, one of such potential applications is sub-wavelength photolithography. Photolithography is the most widely used fabrication technique in integrated circuit industry. However, further decreasing the feature size becomes challenging, in particular, due to the diffraction limit. We experimentally show de-magnifying property of a spherical hyperlens composed of metal-dielectric multilayer structure with a Cr mask on its outer surface. A photoresist was spin-coated on the inner surface of the hyperlens to record the image. After exposure with 405nm light, the pattern on the mask was recorded in the photoresist on the inner surface of the hyperlens, demonstrating 1.6x de-magnification.
We show that unique optical properties of metamaterials open unlimited prospects to “engineer” light itself. For example, we demonstrate a novel way of complex light manipulation in few-mode optical fibers using metamaterials highlighting how unique properties of metamaterials, namely the ability to manipulate both electric and magnetic field components, open new degrees of freedom in engineering complex polarization states of light. We discuss several approaches to ultra-compact structured light generation, including a nanoscale beam converter based on an ultra-compact array of nano-waveguides with a circular graded distribution of channel diameters that coverts a conventional laser beam into a vortex with configurable orbital angular momentum and a novel, miniaturized astigmatic optical element based on a single biaxial hyperbolic metamaterial that enables the conversion of Hermite-Gaussian beams into vortex beams carrying an orbital angular momentum and vice versa. Such beam converters is likely to enable a new generation of on-chip or all-fiber structured light applications. We also present our initial theoretical studies predicting that vortex-based nonlinear optical processes, such as second harmonic generation or parametric amplification that rely on phase matching, will also be strongly modified in negative index materials. These studies may find applications for multidimensional information encoding, secure communications, and quantum cryptography as both spin and orbital angular momentum could be used to encode information; dispersion engineering for spontaneous parametric down-conversion; and on-chip optoelectronic signal processing.
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