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Harvard researchers have developed methods to regulate “factors of darkness” in gentle utilizing metasurfaces, opening up new potentialities in fields like distant sensing, precision measurement, and covert detection. The group created exact darkish spots that may seize atoms or act as measurement factors for imaging, and developed resilient “polarization singularities,” secure darkish spots in polarized optical fields. This can be a scanning electron microscope picture of the metasurface that generated the purpose singularities. Credit score: Harvard College
Two research report new strategies for utilizing metasurfaces to create and management darkish areas referred to as “optical singularities.”
Optical units and supplies enable scientists and engineers to harness gentle for analysis and real-world purposes, like sensing and microscopy. Federico Capasso’s group on the Harvard John A. Paulson Faculty of Engineering Utilized Sciences (SEAS) has devoted years to inventing extra highly effective and complicated optical strategies and instruments. Now, his group has developed new methods to exert management over factors of darkness, slightly than gentle, utilizing metasurfaces.
“Darkish areas in electromagnetic fields, or optical singularities, have historically posed a problem because of their complicated constructions and the issue in shaping and sculpting them. These singularities, nonetheless, carry the potential for groundbreaking purposes in fields resembling distant sensing and precision measurement,” stated Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Utilized Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Analysis Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior corresponding creator on two new papers describing the work.
Experimental depth profiles, with the purpose singularities labeled. Credit score: Harvard College
In 2011, Capasso’s lab launched metasurfaces, or sub-wavelength-spaced arrays of nanostructures. In 2016, they used metasurfaces to construct high-performance metalenses – flat optical lenses comprising nanopillars that they fabricated utilizing semiconductor lithography methods – which unlocked a brand new technique to focus gentle utilizing extraordinarily light-weight units.
The most recent research from the Capasso group – revealed in Nature Communications and Science Advances – report how metasurface technology can harness not just light, but also darkness.
“Both of these studies introduce new classes of optical singularities – regions of designed darkness – using powerful but intuitive algorithms to inform the fabrication of metasurfaces,” said Soon Wei Daniel Lim, co-first author of the paper in Nature Communications with Joon-Suh Park.
In that study, Lim and collaborators designed and fabricated an optical device containing metasurfaces of titanium dioxide nanopillars that can control light to create an array of optical singularities.
To control exactly where these points of darkness appear, Lim used a computer algorithm to help him reverse engineer the design of the metasurface.
“I told the computer: Here’s what I want to achieve in terms of dark spots, tell me what shape and diameter the nanopillars should be on this metasurface to make this happen,” he said.
As light travels through the metasurface and lens, it generates a prescribed array of dark spots.
“These dark spots are exciting because they could be used as optical traps to capture atoms,” Lim said. “It’s possible this could be used to simplify the optical architecture used in atomic physics labs, replacing today’s conventional equipment – instruments that take up 30 feet of space on a lab table – with compact, lightweight optical devices.”
Dark spots aren’t just handy for trapping atoms. They can also be useful as highly precise reference positions for imaging.
“Points of darkness are much smaller than points of light,” Lim said. “As part of an imaging system, that makes them effective points of measurement to accurately discriminate between two different positions within a sample.”
In their Science Advances paper, the Capasso group described a new class of optical singularities: extremely stable points of darkness in a polarized optical field, known as polarization singularities.
“We’ve designed points of darkness that can withstand a wide range of perturbations — they are topologically protected,” said Christina Spaegele, first author of the paper. “This robustness opens the way to optical devices with high reliability and durability in various applications.”
Previous research achieved some polarization singularities, but the conditions for maintaining that perfect spot of darkness were extremely fragile, making them easily destroyed by stray light or other environmental conditions.
“By shining light through a specially-designed metasurface and focusing lens, we can produce an unwavering polarization singularity surrounded entirely by points of light – essentially creating a dark spot inside a sphere of brightness,” Spaegele said.
The technique is so robust that even introducing a defect to the metasurface doesn’t destroy the dark spot, but simply shifts its position.
“This degree of control could be especially useful for imaging samples in ‘hostile’ environments, where vibrations, pressure, temperature, and stray light would typically interfere with imaging behavior,” Spaegele said.
The team says these new developments in optical singularities have implications for remote sensing and covert detection.
“Points of darkness could be used to mask out bright sources while imaging a scene, allowing us to see faint objects that are otherwise overshadowed,” Capasso said. “Objects or detectors placed at these dark positions will also not give away their position by scattering light, allowing them to be ‘hidden’ without affecting the surrounding light.”
References:
“Point singularity array with metasurfaces” by Soon Wei Daniel Lim, Joon-Suh Park, Dmitry Kazakov, Christina M. Spägele, Ahmed H. Dorrah, Maryna L. Meretska and Federico Capasso, 5 June 2023, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-39072-6
“Topologically protected optical polarization singularities in four-dimensional space” by Christina M. Spaegele, Michele Tamagnone, Soon Wei Daniel Lim, Marcus Ossiander, Maryna L. Meretska and Federico Capasso, 16 June 2023, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh0369
Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has protected the intellectual property arising from these studies and is exploring commercialization opportunities.
Additional authors who contributed to these papers include Dmitry Kazakov, Ahmed H. Dorrah, Maryna L. Meterska, Michele Tamagnone, and Marcus Ossiander.
This research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the European Research Council.
