Accelerating Light with Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel method to accelerate light within glass using a metasurface of plasmonic nanoantennas, enabling highly-bending beams suitable for on-chip photonic integration.

Contribution

It introduces a metasurface-based technique for generating accelerating light beams inside materials, overcoming previous scale limitations.

Findings

Generated highly-bending beams with ~100 micron radius of curvature

Imaged intensities match theoretical predictions

Enables integration into on-chip photonic systems

Abstract

It has been recently shown that especially engineered light beams have the remarkable ability to propagate along curved trajectories in vacuum. Current methods for generating accelerating beams use phase modulators and lenses leading to length scales on the order of tens of centimeters or larger. This poses constraints and severely limits their applicability inside materials. Here, we accelerate light inside glass using a metasurface consisting of plasmonic nanoantennas. Highly-bending beams with radii of curvature on the order of a hundred microns were generated, and the imaged intensities agree well with theory. Our approach for generating accelerating beams allows for their integration into on-chip photonic systems.