Nanowerk September 14, 2020
Researchers in the UK have shown that it is possible to create artificial magnetic fields for light by distorting honeycomb metasurfaces that are engineered to have structure on a scale much smaller than the wavelength of light. They embedded the metasurface in photonic cavity and showed that it is possible to tune the artificial magnetic field by changing only the width of the photonic cavity, thereby removing the need to modify the distortion in the metasurface. Using this mechanism it is possible to bend the trajectory of the polaritons using a tunable Lorentz-like force and also observe Landau quantization of the polariton cyclotron orbits, in direct analogy with what happens to charged particles in real magnetic fields. The research could have important implications for future photonic devices as it provides a novel way of manipulating light below the diffraction limit…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Straining a honeycomb metasurface generates an artificial magnetic field for light which can be tuned by embedding the metasurface inside a cavity waveguide. Credit: University of Exeter