KEYWORDS: Terahertz radiation, Near field, Near infrared, Microscopy, Terahertz detection, Spatial resolution, Terahertz sources, Near field optics, Signal detection, Electromagnetic metamaterials, Terahertz spectroscopy
Aperture near-field microscopy and spectroscopy (a-SNOM) enables the direct experimental investigation of subwavelength-sized resonators by sampling highly confined local evanescent fields on the sample surface. Despite its success, the versatility and applicability of a-SNOM is limited by the sensitivity of the aperture probe, as well as the power and versatility of THz sources used to excite samples. Recently, perfectly absorbing photoconductive metasurfaces have been integrated into THz photoconductive antenna detectors, enhancing their efficiency and enabling high signal-to-noise ratio THz detection at significantly reduced optical pump powers. Here, we discuss how this technology can be applied to aperture near-field probes to improve both the sensitivity and potentially spatial resolution of a-SNOM systems. In addition, we explore the application of photoconductive metasurfaces also as near-field THz sources, providing the possibility of tailoring the beam profile, polarity and phase of THz excitation. Photoconductive metasurfaces therefore have the potential to broaden the application scope of aperture near-field microscopy to samples and material systems which currently require improved spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, or more complex excitation conditions.
KEYWORDS: Near field optics, Near field, Silicon, Electron microscopy, Optical imaging, Quantum nanophotonics, Quantum fields, Light-matter interactions, Imaging spectroscopy, Resonators
Experimental examination of light-matter interactions at the nanoscale is challenging since the corresponding electromagnetic near-field is often confined within volumes below the resolution of conventional optical microscopy. Here, we demonstrate that photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) can image near-field optical fields in nanophotonic structures. We present concurrent spectroscopy and imaging of the near-field distribution of resonance modes supported by broken-symmetry silicon metasurfaces. Additionally, we can examine collective modes and deduce that coupling between eight resonators establishes the collective excitations. Altogether, the high-spatial resolution of this hyperspectral imaging approach is valuable for the metrology of collective, non-local optical resonances in nanophotonic systems.
Metasurfaces have been investigated for various applications ranging from beam steering, focusing, to polarization conversion. Along with passive metasurfaces, significant efforts are also being made to design metasurfaces with tunable optical response. Among various approaches, voltage tuning is of particular interest because it creates the possibility of integration with electronics. In this work, we demonstrate voltage tuning of reflectance from a complementary metasurface strongly coupled to an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) mode in an ultrathin semiconductor layer. Our approach involves electrically controlling the carrier concentration of the ENZ layer to modulate the polaritonic coupling between the dipole resonances of the metasurface and the ENZ mode for modulating the reflectance of the metasurface. The hybrid structure we fabricate is similar to MOSCAP configuration where the complementary metasurface offers a continuous gold top layer for biasing and positive/negative bias to the metasurface leads to accumulation/depletion of carriers in the ENZ layer beneath it. We optimized our structure by using InGaAs as the ENZ material because of its high mobility and low effective mass. This allowed us to reduce the doping requirement and thereby reduce the ionized impurity scattering as well as the reverse bias required to deplete the ENZ layer. For low leakage and efficient modulation of carrier density, we used Hafnia as the gate dielectric. We further added a reflecting backplane below the ENZ layer to enhance the interaction and by applying bias, we achieved spectral shifts of 500 nm and amplitude modulation of 11% of one of the polariton branches at 14 µm.
Coupling of metasurfaces to intersubband transitions (ISTs) in semiconductor quantum wells (QWs) has been extensively studied for various applications ranging from generating giant nonlinear optical response to designing tunable metasurfaces for applications such as ultrafast spatial optical modulators and voltage tunable filters. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a fundamentally new approach of actively controlling the coupling of ISTs in QWs to a metasurface for voltage tuning its optical response. Unlike previous approaches, we use voltage-controlled quantum tunneling to control the carrier concentration in the QWs for turning on/off the ISTs. We design a multi-quantum well structure consisting of four undoped InGaAs wells with AlInAs barriers grown on top of a highly doped InGaAs layer that acts as an electron reservoir. The heterostructure is optimized such that the first IST in all the wells is at 11µm. A complementary gold metasurface with dipole resonances at 11µm is fabricated on top of the QW structure. We designed the heterostructure such that by applying a bias of 1V, the energy bands of all the QWs get aligned simultaneously, leading to the occupation of the ground state of all the QWs via quantum tunneling of the electrons from the electron reservoir. The ISTs which were turned off due to negligible electron density gets turned on at 1V, and this leads to coupling between the ISTs and the dipoles resonances of the metasurface. The voltage induced coupling leads to reflectance modulation which we confirmed experimentally by rapid scan double modulation FTIR measurements.
Recent breakthroughs in optical wavefront engineering have opened the possibility of controlling light intensity distribution inside highly scattering medium, but their success is limited by the open geometry of the sample and the difficulty of covering all input modes. Here we demonstrate experimentally an efficient control of energy density distribution inside a strong scattering medium. Instead of the open slab geometry, we fabricate a silicon waveguide that contains scatterers and has reflecting sidewalls. The intensity distribution inside the 2D waveguide is probed from the third dimension. With a careful design of the on-chip coupling waveguide, we can access all the input modes. Such unprecedented control of incident wavefront leads to 10 times enhancement of the total transmission or 50 times suppression. A direct probe of light intensity distribution inside the disordered structure reveals that selective excitation of open channels leads to an energy buildup deep inside the scattering medium, while the excitation of closed channels greatly reduces the penetration depth. Compared to the linear decay for random input fields, the optimized wavefront can produce an intensity profile that is either peaked near the center of the waveguide or decay exponentially with depth. The total energy stored inside the waveguide is increased 3.7 times or decreased 2 times. Since the energy density dictates light-matter interactions inside a scattering system, our results demonstrate the possibility of tailoring optical excitations as well as linear and nonlinear optical processes inside the turbid medium in an on-chip platform.
Spectrometers are widely used tools in chemical and biological sensing, material analysis, and light source
characterization. The development of a high-resolution on-chip spectrometer could enable compact, low-cost
spectroscopy for portable sensing as well as increasing lab-on-a-chip functionality. However, the spectral resolution of
traditional grating-based spectrometers scales with the optical pathlength, which translates to the linear dimension or
footprint of the system, which is limited on-chip. In this work, we utilize multiple scattering in a random photonic
structure fabricated on a silicon chip to fold the optical path, making the effective pathlength much longer than the linear
dimension of the system and enabling high spectral resolution with a small footprint. Of course, the random spectrometer
also requires a different operating paradigm, since different wavelengths are not spatially separated by the random
structure, as they would be by a grating. Instead, light transmitted through the random structure produces a wavelengthdependent
speckle pattern which can be used as a fingerprint to identify the input spectra after calibration. In practice,
these wavelength-dependent speckle patterns are experimentally measured and stored in a transmission matrix, which
describes the spectral-to-spatial mapping of the spectrometer. After calibrating the transmission matrix, an arbitrary
input spectrum can be reconstructed from its speckle pattern. We achieved sub-nm resolution with 25 nm bandwidth at a
wavelength of 1500 nm using a scattering medium with largest dimension of merely 50 μm.
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