Optical concentrator from a hyperbolic liquid crystal metamaterial

TL;DR

This paper investigates how hyperbolic liquid crystal metamaterials can be used to concentrate light along a cylindrical axis, using differential geometry to compare optical models and configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of hyperbolic metamaterials with circular and radial director fields, revealing their potential for optical concentration applications.

Findings

Light concentrates along the cylinder axis in circular director configuration

Differential geometry effectively models the optical behavior of hyperbolic metamaterials

Wave formalism confirms geometrical optics predictions

Abstract

We examine the optical properties of two different configurations of a cylindrical device made from a hyperbolic metamaterial with optical axis defined by circular and radial director fields. The hyperbolic metamaterial is an uniaxial anisotropic medium for which the ratio between ordinary and extraordinary permittivities is negative, leading to a particular effective geometry with two timelike coordinates in the metric (Kleinian signature). By using differential geometry tools we are able to perform a comparison between a simple geometrical optics treatment and the wave formalism that shows the concentration of light along the cylinder axis for the case of the circular field configuration, whatever the injection conditions are.