Light confinement by local index tailoring in inhomogeneous dielectrics

Abstract

The engineering of light confinement is a topic with a long history in optics and with significant implications for the control of light-matter interaction. In inhomogeneous and disordered media, however, multiple scattering prevents the application of conventional approaches for the design of light fields with desired properties. This is because any local change to such a medium typically affects these fields in a non-local and complicated fashion. Here, we present a theoretical methodology for tailoring an inhomogeneous one-dimensional (1D) Hermitian dielectric index distribution, such that the intensity profile of an incoming light field can be controlled purely locally, i.e., with little or no influence on the field profile outside of a designated region of interest. Strongly increasing or decreasing the light's intensity at arbitrary positions inside the medium thereby becomes possible without, in fact, changing the external reflectance or transmittance of the medium. These local modifications of the medium can thus be made undetectable to unidirectional far field measurements. We apply our approach to locally control the confinement of light inside 1D materials with inhomogeneous continuous refractive index profiles and extend it to multilayer films as well as to chains of coupled micro-resonators.

arXiv commentVersion 2, 12 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (18)

• Topological Photonics
• Outlook for inverse design in nanophotonics
• Probing topological invariants in the bulk of a non-Hermitian optical system
• Light fields in complex media: mesoscopic scattering meets wave control
• Selective enhancement of topologically induced interface states in a dielectric resonator chain
• Topologically protected defect states in open photonic systems with non-hermitian charge-conjugation and parity-time symmetry
• Photon Management in Two-Dimensional Disordered Media
• Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics with Anderson-localized Modes
• Dynamic light diffusion, Anderson localization and lasing in disordered inverted opals: 3D ab-initio Maxwell-Bloch computation
• Photon propagation in a discrete fiber network: An interplay of coherence and losses
• Constant-pressure sound waves in non-Hermitian disordered media
• Accuracy of transfer matrix approaches for solving the effective mass Schrödinger equation
• A study of random laser modes in disordered photonic crystals
• Tailoring correlations of the local density of states in disordered photonic materials
• Shape-preserving beam transmission through non-Hermitian disordered lattices
• Scattering-free pulse propagation through invisible non-Hermitian disorder
• Measuring the spatial extent of individual localized photonic states
• Designing scattering-free isotropic index profiles using phase-amplitude equations