Nonlinear, Tunable and Active Optical Metasurface with Liquid Film

TL;DR

This paper theoretically demonstrates that liquid dielectric films can form tunable, symmetry-breaking 2D optical metasurfaces with low lasing thresholds, enabling dynamic control of topological properties and potential for optical computation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel concept of liquid-made optical metasurfaces, revealing their tunability, phase transition behavior, and low-threshold lasing capabilities, expanding the scope of optical metamaterials.

Findings

Liquid dielectric films support surface plasmon polaritons and waveguide modes.

Formation of 2D liquid-based optical lattices with tunable symmetry.

Low lasing threshold compared to solid dielectric films.

Abstract

Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces which emerged in the course of the last few decades have revolutionized our understanding of light and light-matter interaction. While solid materials are naturally employed as key building elements for construction of optical metamaterials mainly due to their structural stability, practically no attention was given to study of liquid-made optical 2D metasurfaces and the underlying interaction regimes between surface optical modes and liquids. In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons and slab waveguide modes that propagate within a thin liquid dielectric film, trigger optical self-induced interaction facilitated by surface tension effects, which lead to formation of 2D optical liquid-made lattices/metasurfaces with tunable symmetry and which can be leveraged for tuning of lasing modes. Furthermore, we show that the symmetry breaking of the 2D optical liquid lattice leads to phase transition and tuning of its topological properties which allows to form, destruct and move Dirac-points in the k-space. Our results indicate that optical liquid lattices support extremely low lasing threshold relative to solid dielectric films and have the potential to serve as configurable analogous computation platform.