Optical nonreciprocity via transmissive time-modulated metasurfaces

• Published in: Nanophotonics (Berlin, Germany) Vol. 11; no. 17; pp. 4135 - 4148
• Main Authors: Barati Sedeh, Hooman, Mohammadi Dinani, Hediyeh, Mosallaei, Hossein
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin De Gruyter 02.09.2022; Walter de Gruyter GmbH
• Subjects: Computer engineering; Light; Metasurfaces; Modulation; optical nonreciprocity; Optical properties; Symmetry; time-modulated metasurfaces; tunable metasurface
• ISSN: 2192-8614; 2192-8606; 2192-8614
• DOI: 10.1515/nanoph-2022-0373

The frequency mixing property of time-modulated metasurfaces, attributed to the well-known phenomenon of temporal photonic transition, has led to several exotic functionalities in the last lustrum. Based on this concept, we demonstrate the possibility of achieving nonreciprocal responses in the near-infrared regime via combining a time-modulated platform and a static high-Q metasurface. In particular, the temporal metasurface is designed to up-convert the incident tone to the first higher-order harmonic, while the static platform is implemented to establish a filtering behavior with respect to the incident frequency. It is shown that while the receiver port acquires the transmitted signal in the forward direction, the amount of received power becomes negligible under the time-reversal scenario, which indicates the presented configuration exhibits different optical responses from opposite directions. In addition, the role of operating wavelength and the modulation frequency on the power isolation level are investigated, and it is demonstrated that by appropriate selection, the isolation level can reach −30 dB. Since this is the first time a nonreciprocal response is obtained in the near-infrared regime via a pure temporal modulation, we believe the idea of this paper can be of utmost importance in various applications, such as tunable optical isolators.