Although vast amounts of information are conveyed by photons in optical fibers, the majority of data processing is performed electronically, creating the infamous ‘information bottleneck’ and consuming energy at an increasingly unsustainable rate. The potential for photonic devices to directly manipulate light remains unfulfilled due largely to a lack of materials with strong, fast optical nonlinearities. In this paper, we show that small-signal amplifier, summator and invertor functions for optical signals may be realized using a four-port device that exploits the coherent interaction of beams on a planar plasmonic metamaterial, assuming no intrinsic nonlinearity. The redistribution of energy among ports can provide nonlinear input-output signal dependencies and may be coherently controlled at very low intensity levels, with multi-THz bandwidth and without introducing signal distortion, thereby presenting powerful opportunities for novel optical data processing architectures, complexity oracles and the locally coherent networks that are becoming part of the mainstream telecommunications agenda.

We report on the demonstration of a femtosecond all-optical modulator providing, without nonlinearity and therefore at arbitrarily low intensity, ultrafast light-by-light control. The device engages the coherent interaction of optical waves on a metamaterial nanostructure only 30 nm thick to efficiently control absorption of near-infrared (750–1040 nm) femtosecond pulses, providing switching contrast ratios approaching 3:1 with a modulation bandwidth in excess of 2 THz. The functional paradigm illustrated here opens the path to a broad family of meta-devices for ultrafast optical data processing in coherent networks.

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In this paper, a novel design for a metamaterial lens (superlens) based on a Photonic Crystal (PC) operating at visible wavelengths is reported. The proposed superlens consist of a gallium phosphide (GaP) dielectric slab waveguide with a hexagonal array of silver rods embedded within the GaP dielectric. In-house 2DFDTD numerical method is used to design and optimize the proposed superlens. Several superlenses are designed and integrated within a same dielectric platform, promoting the proof-of-concept (POC) of possible construction of an array of superlenses (or sub-lenses to create an M-Lens) for light field imaging applications. It is shown that the concavity of the superlens and positioning of each sub-lens within the array strongly affects the performances of the image in terms of resolution. Defects and various geometrical shapes are introduced to construct and optimize the proposed superlenses and increase the quality of the image resolution. It is shown that the orientation of the active region (ellipse) along x and y axis has tremendous influence on the quality of image resolution. In order to investigate the performance characteristics of the superlenses, transmitted power is calculated using 2D FDTD for image projections at various distances (in x and y plane). It is also shown, how the proposed superlens structures could be fabricated using standard micro fabrication techniques such as electron beam lithography, inductively coupled Reactive ion etching, and glancing angle evaporation methods. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first reported POC of superlenses, integrated in a monolithic platform suitable for high imaging resolution that can be used for light field imaging applications at visible wavelength. The proposed superlenses (integrated in a single platform M-Lens) will have tremendous impact on imaging applications.

We experimentally demonstrate that standing waves formed by two coherent counter-propagating light waves can take a variety of forms, offering new approaches to the interrogation and control of polarization-sensitive light-matter interactions in ultrathin (subwavelength thickness) media. In contrast to familiar energy standing waves, polarization standing waves have constant electric and magnetic energy densities and a periodically varying polarization state along the wave axis. counterintuitively, anisotropic ultrathin (meta)materials can be made sensitive or insensitive to such polarization variations by adjusting their azimuthal angle.