Unidirectional reflectionless light propagation at exceptional points

Nanophotonics

article

Yin Huang¹  Yuecheng Shen³  Changjun Min²  Shanhui Fan⁴  Georgios Veronis⁵ 

[1] Department of Optoelectrics Information Science and Engineering, School of Physics and Electronics, Central South University;Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Devices and Systems of the Ministry of Education and Guangdong Province, Shenzhen University;Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis;E.L. Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University;School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Louisiana State University;Center for Computation and Technology, Louisiana State University

关键词: invisibility;    parity-time symmetry;    exceptional points;    waveguides;    optical devices;   

DOI  :  10.1515/nanoph-2017-0019

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: De Gruyter

【 摘 要 】

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of unidirectional reflectionless light propagation in photonic devices at exceptional points (EPs). EPs, which are branch point singularities of the spectrum, associated with the coalescence of both eigenvalues and corresponding eigenstates, lead to interesting phenomena, such as level repulsion and crossing, bifurcation, chaos, and phase transitions in open quantum systems described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. Recently, it was shown that judiciously designed photonic synthetic matters could mimic the complex non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in quantum mechanics and realize unidirectional reflection at optical EPs. Unidirectional reflectionlessness is of great interest for optical invisibility. Achieving unidirectional reflectionless light propagation could also be potentially important for developing optical devices, such as optical network analyzers. Here, we discuss unidirectional reflectionlessness at EPs in both parity-time ( PT )-symmetric and non- PT -symmetric optical systems. We also provide an outlook on possible future directions in this field.

【 授权许可】

CC BY