Light goes infinitely fast with new on-chip material

[n2doc]

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have done just that, designing the first on-chip metamaterial with a refractive index of zero, meaning that the phase of light can travel infinitely fast.

This new metamaterial was developed in the lab of Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and Area Dean for Applied Physics at SEAS, and is described in the journal Nature Photonics.

"Light doesn't typically like to be squeezed or manipulated but this metamaterial permits you to manipulate light from one chip to another, to squeeze, bend, twist and reduce diameter of a beam from the macroscale to the nanoscale," said Mazur. "It's a remarkable new way to manipulate light."

Although this infinitely high velocity sounds like it breaks the rule of relativity, it doesn't. Nothing in the universe travels faster than light carrying information -- Einstein is still right about that. But light has another speed, measured by how fast the crests of a wavelength move, known as phase velocity. This speed of light increases or decreases depending on the material it's moving through.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151019122240.htm

[phantom power]

1. aha - the big news is it allows lossless manipulation:

In a zero-index material, there is no phase advance, meaning light no longer behaves as a moving wave, traveling through space in a series of crests and troughs. Instead, the zero-index material creates a constant phase -- all crests or all troughs -- stretching out in infinitely long wavelengths. The crests and troughs oscillate only as a variable of time, not space.

This uniform phase allows the light to be stretched or squished, twisted or turned, without losing energy. A zero-index material that fits on a chip could have exciting applications, especially in the world of quantum computing.

"Integrated photonic circuits are hampered by weak and inefficient optical energy confinement in standard silicon waveguides," said Yang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Mazur Group and first author on the paper. "This zero-index metamaterial offers a solution for the confinement of electromagnetic energy in different waveguide configurations because its high internal phase velocity produces full transmission, regardless of how the material is configured."