Controlling Surface Plasmons Through Covariant Transformation of the Spin-Dependent Geometric Phase Between Curved Metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a covariant transformation approach using curved metamaterials to control surface plasmons and generate accelerating beams like Rindler beams, inspired by principles of general relativity.

Contribution

It presents a novel covariant design method for controlling surface plasmons via geometric phase manipulation in curved metamaterials, inspired by general relativity.

Findings

Successfully mimicked accelerating particles using curved metamaterials.

Generated Rindler beams based on the Rindler metric.

Achieved large effective indices through geometric phase gradients.

Abstract

General relativity uses curved space-time to describe accelerating frames. The movement of particles in different curved space-times can be regarded as equivalent physical processes based on the covariant transformation between different frames. In this work, we use one-dimensional curved metamaterials to mimic accelerating particles in curved space-times. The different curved shapes of structures are used to mimic different accelerating frames. The different geometric phases along the structure are used to mimic different movements in the frame. Using the covariant principle of general relativity, we can obtain equivalent nanostructures based on space-time transformations, such as the Lorentz transformation and conformal transformation. In this way, many covariant structures can be found which produce the same surface plasmon fields when excited by spin photons. A new kind of accelerating beam, the Rindler beam, is obtained based on the Rindler metric in gravity. Very large effective indexes can be obtained in such systems based on geometric phase gradient. This general covariant design method can be extended to many other optical media.