Singular states of resonant nanophotonic lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates singular states in nanophotonic lattices, revealing how lattice geometry and material composition influence bright and dark resonant channels, with theoretical and experimental insights into bound states in the continuum.

Contribution

It introduces a Rytov-type effective medium theory to accurately describe and predict BIC states and resonant phenomena in nanophotonic lattices, including asymmetric configurations.

Findings

Dark BIC states are predicted with high accuracy using EMT.

Leaky-band metamorphosis leads to merged modal bands and offset dark states.

Experimental verification confirms theoretical predictions.

Abstract

Fundamental effects in nanophotonic resonance systems focused on singular states and their properties are presented. Strongly related to lattice geometry and material composition, there appear resonant bright channels and non-resonant dark channels in the spectra. The bright state corresponds to high reflectivity guided-mode resonance (GMR) whereas the dark channel represents a bound state in the continuum (BIC). Even in simple systems, singular states with tunable bandwidth appear as isolated spectral lines that are widely separated from other resonance features. Under moderate lattice modulation, there ensues leaky-band metamorphosis, merging modal bands and resulting in offset dark states and reflective BICs along with transmissive BICs within a high-reflectance wideband. Rytov-type effective medium theory (EMT) is shown to be a powerful means to describe, formulate, and understand the collective GMR/BIC fundamentals in resonant photonic systems. Particularly, the discarded Rytov analytical solution for asymmetric fields is shown here to predict the dark BIC states essentially exactly for considerable modulation levels. The propagation constant of an equivalent EMT homogeneous film provides a quantitative evaluation of the eminent, oft-cited embedded BIC eigenvalue. The work concludes with experimental verification of key effects.