Chiral nanophotonic waveguide interface based on spin-orbit interaction of light

By Jan Petersen, Jurgen Volz, Arno Rauschenbeutel. Science, 2014

715 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Controlling the flow of light with nanoparticles Light propagating through optic fibers could provide the ultimate in information flow, but controlling the direction of flow is a key requirement. Petersen et al. show that the directional flow of light in a fiber can be controlled by placing a single gold nanoparticle on or near the surface of the fiber. By exploiting the chiral properties of light (the spin-orbit interaction), the authors demonstrate that the “handedness” or polarization state of the light hitting the particle determines in which direction the light flows in the fiber. Science, this issue p. 67 A gold nanoparticle can control the directional flow of light in a fiber. Controlling the flow of light with nanophotonic waveguides has the potential of transforming integrated information processing. Because of the strong transverse confinement of the guided photons, their internal spin and their orbital angular momentum get coupled. Using this spin-orbit interaction of light, we break the mirror symmetry of the scattering of light with a gold nanoparticle on the surface of a nanophotonic waveguide and realize a chiral waveguide coupler in which the handedness of the incident light determines the propagation direction in the waveguide. We control the directionality of the scattering process and can direct up to 94% of the incoupled light into a given direction. Our approach allows for the control and manipulation of light in optical waveguides and new designs of optical sensors.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a26ae6e354e45ed6eca633ab991a9face5fb534

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Citations in the corpus

Microwave photonics with superconducting quantum circuits (2017, methodology): “a waveguide for optical light made from an organic crystal [532], a gold nanoparticle coupled to a photonic waveguide made from a silica nanofiber [533], and an NV center coupled to a plasmonic groove waveguide [534].”
Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, background): “The beam polarization can thus acquire a component of the electric field along the direction of propagation, which can have π=2 phase difference with the transversely oriented components (Lin et al., 2013; Rodriguez-Fortuno et al., 2013; Petersen, Volz, and Rauschenbeutel, 2014).”
Transverse and longitudinal angular momenta of light (2015, background): “Examples of recent experiments [53,77,78] demonstrating spin-controlled unidirectional excitation of modes with evanescent tails.”
Colloquium: Strongly interacting photons in one-dimensional continuum (2016, background): “Utilizing the spin-orbit coupling, several experimental groups (Le Feber et al., 2015; Petersen et al., 2014) have recently demonstrated nonreciprocal scattering of light from dipolar scatterers (QDs, gold nanoparticles, alkali atoms) coupled to waveguides (photonic crystals, nanofibers).”
On-demand directional microwave photon emission using waveguide quantum electrodynamics (2022, background): “[7] Jan Petersen, Jürgen Volz, and Arno Rauschenbeutel, “Chiral nanophotonic waveguide interface based on spinorbit interaction of light,” Science 346, 67–71 (2014).”