Cooperative optical wavefront engineering with atomic arrays

Natural materials typically interact weakly with the magnetic component of light which greatly limits their applications. This has led to the development of artificial metamaterials and metasurfaces. However, natural atoms, where only electric dipole transitions are relevant at optical frequencies,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-12
Main Authors: Ballantine, Kyle E, Ruostekoski, Janne
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Angular momentum
Arrays
Converters
Electric dipoles
Light diffraction
Magnetic dipoles
Magnetic lenses
Magnetic mirrors
Magnetic properties
Metamaterials
Phase control
Reflection
Wave fronts
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Summary:Natural materials typically interact weakly with the magnetic component of light which greatly limits their applications. This has led to the development of artificial metamaterials and metasurfaces. However, natural atoms, where only electric dipole transitions are relevant at optical frequencies, can cooperatively respond to light to form collective excitations with strong magnetic, as well as electric, interactions, together with corresponding electric and magnetic mirror reflection properties. By combining the electric and magnetic collective degrees of freedom we show that ultrathin planar arrays of atoms can be utilized as atomic lenses to focus light to subwavelength spots at the diffraction limit, to steer light at different angles allowing for optical sorting, and as converters between different angular momentum states. The method is based on coherently superposing induced electric and magnetic dipoles to engineer a quantum nanophotonic Huygens' surface of atoms, giving full \(2\pi\) phase control over the transmission, with close to zero reflection.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2112.11866