Micro-optical technology based on metamaterials takes center stage

Phys.org  August 30, 2023 To date research on metasurfaces has mainly focused on the full control of electromagnetic characteristics, including polarization, phase, amplitude, and even frequencies. Consequently, versatile possibilities of electromagnetic wave control have been achieved, yielding practical optical components such as metalenses, beam-steerers, metaholograms, and sensors. Researchers in South Korea focused on integrating the metasurfaces with other standard optical components for commercialization with miniaturization trends of optical devices. In this review they described and classified metasurface-integrated optical components, and subsequently discussed their promising applications with metasurface-integrated optical platforms including those of augmented/virtual reality, light detection and ranging, and sensors. […]

On-chip light source produces versatile range of wavelengths

Science Daily  December 19, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (NIST, University of Maryland, Carnegie Mellon University) has created visible light from an infrared pump by widely separated optical parametric oscillation (OPO) using silicon nanophotonics. The OPO creates signal and idler light in the 700 nm and 1300 nm bands, respectively, with a 900 nm pump. It operates at a threshold power of (0.9±0.1)mW, over 50× smaller than other widely separated microcavity OPO works, which have been reported only in the infrared. This low threshold enables direct pumping without need of an intermediate optical amplifier. The device design […]

Unlocking the untapped potential of light in optical communications

Phys.org  March 8, 2019 The optical vortex carries the orbital angular momentum of light and can be used to multiplex signals by assigning each signal to a light wave of different momentum. Researchers in Japan designed and fabricated an orbital angular momentum multiplexing/demultiplexing module that could take five independent signals as input. Using a combination of two tiny circuit structures, called a star coupler and an optical-vortex generator, each of the five signals is “encoded” with a unique optical angular momentum. The output signal consists of a combination of the five signals, and the receiver circuit carries out the multiplexing […]