Realization of broadband truly rainbow trapping in gradient-index heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates ultra-broadband one-way waveguides and broadband rainbow trapping in gradient-index metamaterials, significantly expanding the operational bandwidth for terahertz applications and enabling strong electric field enhancements.

Contribution

It introduces two methods to achieve ultra-broadband one-way waveguides and demonstrates broadband rainbow trapping using gradient-index metamaterials with finite element verification.

Findings

Bandwidth of COWP bands increased by over three times

Broadband TRT realized without backward reflection

Electric field enhanced by five orders of magnitude

Abstract

Unidirectionally propagating waves (UPW) such as topologically protected edge modes and surface magnetoplasmons (SMPs) has been a research hotspot in the last decades. In the study of UPW, metals are usually treated as perfect electric conductors (PECs) which, in general, are the boundary conditions. However, it was reported that the transverse resonance condition induced by the PEC wall(s) may significantly narrow up the complete one-way propagation (COWP) band. In this paper, we propose two ways to achieve ultra-broadband one-way waveguide in terahertz regime. The first way is utilizing the epsilon negative (ENG) metamaterial (MM) and the other one is replacing the PEC boundary with perfect magnetic conductor (PMC) boundary. In both conditions, the total bandwidth of the COWP bands can be efficiently broadened by more than three times. Moreover, based on the ultra-broadband one-way configurations, gradient-index metamaterial-based one-way waveguides are proposed to achieve broadband truly rainbow trapping (TRT). By utilizing the finite element method, the realization of the broadband TRT without backward reflection is verified in gradient-index structures. Besides, giant electric field enhancement is observed in a PMC-based one-way structure with an ultra-subwavelength ($\approx 10^{-4} \lambda_0$, $\lambda_0$ is the wavelength in vaccum) terminal, and the amplitude of the electric field is enormously enhanced by five orders of magnitude. Our findings are beneficial for researches on broadband terahertz communication, energy harvesting and strong-field devices.