Confining Light in Deep Subwavelength Electromagnetic Cavities

Abstract

We demonstrate that it is possible to confine electromagnetic radiation in cavities that are significantly smaller than the wavelength of the radiation it encapsulates. To this aim, we use the techniques of transformation optics. First, we present a "perfect cavity" of arbitrarily small size in which such confined modes can exist. Furthermore, we show that these eigenmodes have a continuous spectrum and that bending losses are absent, in contrast to what is observed in traditional microcavities. Finally, we introduce an alternative cavity configuration that is less sensitive to material imperfections and still exhibits deep subwavelength modes combined with high quality factor, even if considerable material losses are included. Such a cavity may be interesting for the storage of information in optical data processing and for applications in quantum optics.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Hiding Under the Carpet: a New Strategy for Cloaking
• Dielectric Optical Cloak
• Calculation of material properties and ray tracing in transformation media
• Illusion optics: The optical transformation of an object into another object
• Design of Electromagnetic Cloaks and Concentrators Using Form-Invariant Coordinate Transformations of Maxwell's Equations
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Creating electromagnetic cavities using transformation optics
• A transformation optics approach to singular metasurfaces
• Metamaterials Mimicking Dynamic Spacetime, D-brane and Noncommutativity in String Theory
• Creating a zero-order resonator using an optical surface transformation