The United States designs metamaterials with zero refractive index that can be integrated into chips
Scientists at Harvard University in the US have designed for the first time a metamaterial with a zero refractive index that can be integrated onto a chip
Release time:
2022-10-21
Scientists at Harvard University in the US have designed for the first time a metamaterial with a zero refractive index that can be integrated onto a chip, allowing light to travel at "infinite" speeds. This result opens the door to explore the physics of zero refractive index and its application in integrated optics.
The zero-refractive index material consists of an array of gold-plated silicon columns embedded in a polymer matrix. It has no phase advance and produces a stationary phase state whose wavelength can be viewed as infinitely long.
This may sound like a violation of the laws of relativity, but it isn't. Nothing in the universe can travel faster than light, but light has another speed, the speed at which a wave's crest moves, called phase velocity. This speed depends on the material through which the light travels. For example, when light passes through water, the phase velocity decreases because its wavelength is squeezed, and when it enters water, the phase velocity increases again because its wavelength is stretched. In the medium, the refractive index is used to represent the slowing down of the light wave crest. The higher the refractive index is, the greater the interference to the light wave diffraction. For example, the refractive index of water is about 1.3.
In a zero-index material, there is no phase advance of peaks and troughs, which means that light no longer behaves like a moving wave but a stationary phase, with all the peaks and troughs arranged in infinite wavelengths. Peaks and troughs are only a temporal variable, not a spatial one.
Light is difficult to squeeze or manipulate, and this uniform state allows light to stretch, squeeze or twist without losing energy. The integration of zero-index materials into chips promises promising applications, especially in quantum computing.
The zero-index metamaterials, which consist of arrays of gold-plated silicon columns embedded in a polymer matrix, can couple silicon waveguides to standard integrated photonic devices and chip interfaces, allowing people to manipulate light from chip to chip, squeeze and distort it, and even reduce beam diameters to nanometers, according to a report by Physics.org.net. Eric Mazur, professor of physics and applied physics at the university's John Polson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), said it's a great new way to control light. "This on-chip metamaterial opens the door to exploring zero-index physics and its applications in integrated optics."
Yang Li, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in Mazur's group, says that in ordinary silicon waveguides, light energy confinement is weak and ineffective, which is a major obstacle to integrating photonic circuits. This zero-index material offers a solution for confining electromagnetic energy in different waveguide structures.
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