Anomalous diffraction in hyperbolic materials

Abstract

We demonstrate that light is subject to anomalous (i.e., negative) diffraction when propagating in the presence of hyperbolic dispersion. We show that light propagation in hyperbolic media resembles the dynamics of a quantum particle of negative mass moving in a two-dimensional potential. The negative effective mass implies time reversal if the medium is homogeneous. Such property paves the way to diffraction compensation, spatial analogue of dispersion compensating fibers in the temporal domain. At variance with materials exhibiting standard elliptic dispersion, in inhomogeneous hyperbolic materials light waves are pulled towards regions with a lower refractive index. In the presence of a Kerr-like optical response, bright (dark) solitons are supported by a negative (positive) nonlinearity.

10 pages, 10 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review A

References in corpus (14)

• Optical Hyperlens: Far-field imaging beyond the diffraction limit
• Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Media with Indefinite Permittivity and Permeability Tensors
• Topological Transitions in Metamaterials
• Broadband Purcell effect: Radiative decay engineering with metamaterials
• Non-magnetic left-handed material
• Nanowire metamaterials with extreme optical anisotropy
• Engineered Optical Nonlocality in Nanostructured Metamaterials
• Metric Signature Transitions in Optical Metamaterials
• Magnetic hyperbolic optical metamaterials
• Effective medium theory for anisotropic metamaterials
• Optical Field Enhancement in Nanoscale Slot Waveguides of Hyperbolic Metamaterials
• Analogue gravity in hyperbolic metamaterials
• Hyperbolic blackbody
• Theory of Spatial Optical Solitons in Metallic Nanowire Materials