Nonlinearity in the Dark: Broadband Terahertz Generation with Extremely High Efficiency

Ming Fang, Nian-Hai Shen, Wei E. I. Sha, Zhixiang Huang, Thomas Koschny, and Costas M. Soukoulis
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 027401 – Published 18 January 2019
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Abstract

Plasmonic metamaterials and metasurfaces offer new opportunities in developing high performance terahertz emitters and detectors beyond the limitations of conventional nonlinear materials. However, simple meta-atoms for second-order nonlinear applications encounter fundamental trade-offs in the necessary symmetry breaking and local-field enhancement due to radiation damping that is inherent to the operating resonant mode and cannot be controlled separately. Here we present a novel concept that eliminates this restriction obstructing the improvement of terahertz generation efficiency in nonlinear metasurfaces based on metallic nanoresonators. This is achieved by combining a resonant dark-state metasurface, which locally drives nonlinear nanoresonators in the near field, with a specific spatial symmetry that enables destructive interference of the radiating linear moments of the nanoresonators, and perfect absorption via simultaneous electric and magnetic critical coupling of the pump radiation to the dark mode. Our proposal allows eliminating linear radiation damping, while maintaining constructive interference and effective radiation of the nonlinear components. We numerically demonstrate a giant second-order nonlinear susceptibility 1011m/V, a one order improvement compared with the previously reported split-ring-resonator metasurface, and correspondingly, a 2 orders of magnitude enhanced terahertz energy extraction should be expected with our configuration under the same conditions. Our study offers a paradigm of high efficiency tunable nonlinear metadevices and paves the way to revolutionary terahertz technologies and optoelectronic nanocircuitry.

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  • Received 18 July 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.027401

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Ming Fang1,2, Nian-Hai Shen1,*, Wei E. I. Sha3, Zhixiang Huang2,†, Thomas Koschny1, and Costas M. Soukoulis1,4

  • 1Ames Laboratory—U.S. DOE and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA
  • 2Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, Anhui University, Hefei 230039, China
  • 3Key Laboratory of Micro-nano Electronic Devices and Smart Systems of Zhejiang Province, College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
  • 4Institute of Electronic Structure and Lasers (IESL), FORTH, 71110 Heraklion, Crete, Greece

  • *nhshen@ameslab.gov
  • zxhuang@ahu.edu.cn

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Issue

Vol. 122, Iss. 2 — 18 January 2019

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