Topological Extraordinary Optical Transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces a broadband topological structure enabling near-perfect optical transmission through nanoscale slits, significantly improving efficiency over traditional methods and impacting nanoscopy and data storage technologies.

Contribution

It presents a novel topological, unidirectional guiding structure that achieves near-100% optical transmission through subdiffraction nanoscale slits without adiabatic tapering.

Findings

Normalized transmission coefficient reaches 1.52 for a lambda_eff / 72 slit.

Transmission through a lambda_eff / 21 slit reaches 1.14, limited only by material losses.

Zero reflection observed from the slit under ideal conditions.

Abstract

The incumbent technology for bringing light to the nanoscale, the near-field scanning optical microscope, has notoriously small throughput efficiencies - of the order of 10^(-4) - 10^(-5), or less. We report on a broadband, topological, unidirectionally-guiding structure, not requiring adiabatic tapering and in principle enabling near-perfect (ideally, ~100%) optical transmission through an unstructured single (POTUS) arbitrarily-subdiffraction slit at its end. Specifically, for a slit width of just lambda_eff / 72 (lambda_0 / 138) the attained normalized transmission coefficient reaches a value of 1.52, while for a unidirectional-only (non-topological) device the normalized transmission through a lambda_eff / 21 (~lambda_0 / 107) slit reaches 1.14 - both, limited only by inherent material losses, and with zero reflection from the slit. The associated, under ideal conditions, near-perfect optical extraordinary transmission (POET) has implications, among diverse areas in wave physics and engineering, for high-efficiency, maximum-throughput nanoscopes and heat-assisted magnetic recording devices.