Beam steering at the nanosecond time scale with an atomically thin reflector

Abstract

Techniques to mold the flow of light on subwavelength scales enable fundamentally new optical systems and device applications. The realization of programmable, active optical systems with fast, tunable components is among the outstanding challenges in the field. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a few-pixel beam steering device based on electrostatic gate control of excitons in an atomically thin semiconductor with strong light-matter interactions. By combining the high reflectivity of a MoSe2 monolayer with a graphene split-gate geometry, we shape the wavefront phase profile to achieve continuously tunable beam deflection with a range of 10${}^{\circ }$, two-dimensional beam steering, and switching times down to 1.6 nanoseconds. Our approach opens the door for a new class of atomically thin optical systems, such as rapidly switchable beam arrays and quantum metasurfaces operating at their fundamental thickness limit.

References in corpus (17)

• Observation of tightly bound trions in monolayer MoS2
• Electrical Control of Two-Dimensional Neutral and Charged Excitons in a Monolayer Semiconductor
• Optical Generation of Excitonic Valley Coherence in Monolayer WSe2
• Gate-tunable conducting oxide metasurfaces
• Fermi polaron-polaritons in charge-tunable atomically thin semiconductors
• Electrically Reconfigurable Nonvolatile Metasurface Using Low-Loss Optical Phase Change Material
• Metasurfaces for Quantum Photonics
• Electrical Tuning of Phase Change Antennas and Metasurfaces
• Cooperative resonances in light scattering from two-dimensional atomic arrays
• Atomically thin mirrors made of monolayer semiconductors
• Exciton band structure in layered MoSe2: from a monolayer to the bulk limit
• Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations of high mobility holes in monolayer and bilayer WSe${}_2$: Landau level degeneracy, effective mass, and negative compressibility
• Quantum Metasurfaces
• Realization of an atomically thin mirror using monolayer MoSe2
• Giant optical nonlinearities from Rydberg-excitons in semiconductor microcavities
• Quantum Nonlinear Optics in Atomically Thin Materials
• Laser Annealing for Radiatively Broadened MoSe2 grown by Chemical Vapor Deposition

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Characterizing superradiant dynamics in atomic arrays via a cumulant expansion approach
• Cooperative quantum-optical planar arrays of atoms
• Excitonic beam steering in an active van der Waals metasurface
• Optimized geometries for cooperative photon storage in an impurity coupled to a two-dimensional atomic array
• Photonics in Flatland: Challenges and Opportunities for Nanophotonics with 2D Semiconductors