Topological Transitions in Metamaterials

By H. Krishnamoorthy, Z. Jacob, Evgenii Narimanov, I. Kretzschmar, V. Menon. Science, 2011

783 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Manipulating Optical Topology Phase transitions in solid-state systems are often associated with a drastic change in the properties of that system. For example, metal-to-insulator transition or magnetic-to-nonmagnetic states find wide application in memory storage technology. An exotic electronic phase transition is the Lifshitz transition, whereby the Fermi surface undergoes a change in topology and a drastic change in the electronic density of states. Krishnamoorthy et al. (p. 205) now show that the notion of such a phase transition can be carried over to the optical regime by the suitable design of a metamaterial structure. This effect could be used to control the interaction between light and matter. Metamaterials can undergo an optical analog of electronic phase transitions that impacts local light-matter interactions. Light-matter interactions can be controlled by manipulating the photonic environment. We uncovered an optical topological transition in strongly anisotropic metamaterials that results in a dramatic increase in the photon density of states—an effect that can be used to engineer this interaction. We describe a transition in the topology of the iso-frequency surface from a closed ellipsoid to an open hyperboloid by use of artificially nanostructured metamaterials. We show that this topological transition manifests itself in increased rates of spontaneous emission of emitters positioned near the metamaterial. Altering the topology of the iso-frequency surface by using metamaterials provides a fundamentally new route to manipulating light-matter interactions.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4f8ce48929b5ca99bfb61bb1c4cad1fa5cae586

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum nanophotonics using hyperbolic metamaterials (2012, background): “between the various surfaces in k -space occur within the borders of the different coloured regions in the graphs [27].”
Spatiotemporal light control with active metasurfaces (2019, background): “Layered VO2-TiO2 heterostructures have also provided valuable dispersion control, in which one can elicit a hyperbolic-to-elliptic phase transition (62).”
Plasmonic materials for energy: From physics to applications (2013, background): “-field optical coupling between SPP waves formed on each surface or wire results in formation of multiple SPP branches in the dispersion characteristics of such anisotropic metamaterials (Fig. 1(c2)) [48, 49, 50, 51, 52]. In the limit of the infinite number of ultra-thin layers, such metamaterials c”
Applications of Hyperbolic Metamaterial Substrates (2012, methodology): “This has many implications for thermal engineering using metamaterials, and experiments are currently underway using phononpolaritonic HMMs [43] to measure this unique effect using topological transitions [30, 44].”