Non-Reciprocal Optical Antennas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a plasmonic non-reciprocal antenna that enables independent control of excitation and emission properties through nonlinear effects, advancing optical component design for photonics-electronics integration.

Contribution

It presents the first plasmonic non-reciprocal antenna design utilizing nonlinear excitation to decouple excitation and emission wavelengths, allowing independent tuning.

Findings

Demonstrated non-reciprocal behavior in gold and aluminum nanoantennas.

Achieved independent optimization of emission intensity, spectrum, polarization, and angular distribution.

Showcased potential applications as nonlinear signal transducers and tunable light sources.

Abstract

Plasmonics aims to interface photonics and electronics. Finding optical, near-field analogues of much used electro-technical components is crucial to the success of such a platform. Here we present the plasmonic analogue of a non-reciprocal antenna. For non-reciprocality in a plasmonic context, the optical excitation and emission resonances of the antenna need to be an orthogonal set. We show that nonlinear excitation of metal nanoantennas creates a sufficient shift between excitation and emission wavelengths that they can be interpreted as decoupled, allowing for independent tuning of excitation and emission properties along different spatial dimensions. This leads, for given excitation wavelength and polarization, to independent optimization of emission intensity, frequency spectrum, polarization and angular spectrum. Non-reciprocal optical antennas of both gold and aluminum are characterized and shown to be useful as e.g. nonlinear signal transducers or nanoscale sources of widely tunable light.