Anisotropy-induced photonic bound states in the continuum

By J. Gomis-Bresco, D. Artigas, L. Torner. Nature Photonics, 2017

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Existence conditions of bound states within the continuum of radiative modes are revealed for waveguides with anisotropic birefringent materials. Bound states in the continuum (BICs) are radiationless localized states embedded in the part of the parameter space that otherwise corresponds to radiative modes. Many decades after their original prediction1,2,3 and early observations in acoustic systems4, such states have been demonstrated recently in photonic structures with engineered geometries5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18. Here, we put forward a mechanism, based on waveguiding structures that contain anisotropic birefringent materials, that affords the existence of BICs with fundamentally new properties. In particular, anisotropy-induced BICs may exist in symmetric as well as in asymmetric geometries; they may form in tunable angular propagation directions; their polarization may be pure transverse electric, pure transverse magnetic or full vector with tunable polarization hybridity; and they may be the only possible bound states of properly designed structures, and thus appear as a discrete, isolated bound state embedded in a whole sea of radiative states.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53d776a8eb96651b33454e65fecdaa2863688a3a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. M. Xiao
2. Tao Liu
3. Meng Kang
4. C. T. Chan
5. Douglas H. Werner
6. Do-Hoon Kwon
7. Ankit Srivastava

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. M. Xiao
2. Meng Kang
3. Tao Liu
4. C. T. Chan
5. Ankit Srivastava
6. Douglas H. Werner
7. Do-Hoon Kwon

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. C. T. Chan

Citations in the corpus

• Applications of bound states in the continuum in photonics (2023, background): “Ani-sotropy can also induce BICs, leading to light confinement in photonic systems such as anisotropic waveguides 41,42 , 1D photonic crystals with an anisotropic defect layer 43,44 , and materials with intrinsic anisotropy such as LiNbO 3 .”