Observation of trapped light within the radiation continuum

By Chia Wei Hsu, B. Zhen, Jeongwon Lee, Song Liang Chua, Steven G. Johnson, John D. Joannopoulos, Marin Soljačić. Nature, 2013

1,313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ability to confine light is important both scientifically and technologically. Many light confinement methods exist, but they all achieve confinement with materials or systems that forbid outgoing waves. These systems can be implemented by metallic mirrors, by photonic band-gap materials, by highly disordered media (Anderson localization) and, for a subset of outgoing waves, by translational symmetry (total internal reflection) or by rotational or reflection symmetry. Exceptions to these examples exist only in theoretical proposals. Here we predict and show experimentally that light can be perfectly confined in a patterned dielectric slab, even though outgoing waves are allowed in the surrounding medium. Technically, this is an observation of an ‘embedded eigenvalue’—namely, a bound state in a continuum of radiation modes—that is not due to symmetry incompatibility. Such a bound state can exist stably in a general class of geometries in which all of its radiation amplitudes vanish simultaneously as a result of destructive interference. This method to trap electromagnetic waves is also applicable to electronic and mechanical waves.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e1eae928a40a7172c4e9fb8379ce8518140c632

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Citations in the corpus

Applications of bound states in the continuum in photonics (2023, background): “This mechanism can be used to explain scenarios in which the radiation at some specific wavevectors in a PCS was accidentally eliminated 28 .”
Anisotropy-induced photonic bound states in the continuum (2017, background): “Imposing this condition in the general eigenvalue equation for bound states leads to Supplementary equations (9) and (10), which thus provide the algorithm to search for full-vector interferometric BICs.”