Giant Transverse Optical Forces in Nanoscale Slot Waveguides of Hyperbolic Metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that nanoscale slot waveguides made of hyperbolic metamaterials can generate extremely strong transverse optical forces, vastly surpassing those in conventional silicon waveguides, enabling advanced nanoscale optomechanical applications.

Contribution

The study introduces a method to produce giant transverse optical forces in hyperbolic metamaterial waveguides, with detailed analysis and realistic structure calculations confirming experimental feasibility.

Findings

Optical forces are over 100 times stronger than in silicon waveguides.

Both attractive and repulsive forces are analyzed based on mode symmetry.

Enhanced forces enable potential applications in nanoscale optomechanics.

Abstract

Here we demonstrate that giant transverse optical forces can be generated in nanoscale slot waveguides of hyperbolic metamaterials, with more than two orders of magnitude stronger compared to the force created in conventional silicon slot waveguides, due to the nanoscale optical field enhancement and the extreme optical energy compression within the air slot region. Both numerical simulation and analytical treatment are carried out to study the dependence of the optical forces on the waveguide geometries and the metamaterial permittivity tensors, including the attractive optical forces for the symmetric modes and the repulsive optical forces for the anti-symmetric modes. The significantly enhanced transverse optical forces result from the strong optical mode coupling strength between two metamaterial waveguides, which can be explained with an explicit relation derived from the coupled mode theory. Moreover, the calculation on realistic metal-dielectric multilayer structures indicates that the predicted giant optical forces are achievable in experiments, which will open the door for various optomechanical applications in nanoscale, such as optical nanoelectromechanical systems, optical sensors and actuators.