Tapered Photonic Switching

Abstract

The advent of novel nonlinear materials has stirred unprecedented interest in exploring the use of temporal inhomogeneities to achieve novel forms of wave control, amidst the greater vision of engineering metamaterials across both space and time. When the properties of an unbounded medium are abruptly switched in time, propagating waves are efficiently converted to different frequencies, and partially coupled to their back-propagating phase-conjugate partners, through a process called time-reversal. However, in realistic materials the switching time is necessarily finite, playing a central role in the resulting temporal scattering features. By identifying and leveraging the crucial role of electromagnetic momentum conservation in time-reversal processes, here we develop a very general analytical formalism to quantify time-reversal due to temporal inhomogeneities of arbitrary profile. Finally, we deploy our analytic theory to develop a formalism, analogous to spatial tapering theory, that enables the tailoring of a desired time-reversal spectral response, demonstrating its use for the realization of broadband frequency converters and filters.

References in corpus (10)

• Photonics of Time-Varying Media
• Experimental band structure spectroscopy along a synthetic dimension
• Temporal multilayer structures for designing higher-order transfer functions using time-varying metamaterials
• Homogenisation Theory of Space-Time Metamaterials
• Parametric amplification and bidirectional invisibility in PT-symmetric time-Floquet systems
• Time-Varying Materials in Presence of Dispersion: Plane-Wave Propagation in a Lorentzian Medium with Temporal Discontinuity
• Temporal Switching to Extend the Bandwidth of Thin Absorbers
• Universal statistics of waves in a random time-varying medium
• Spectral Causality and the Scattering of Waves
• Temporal Parity-Time Symmetry for Extreme Energy Transformations

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Observation of Temporal Reflections and Broadband Frequency Translations at Photonic Time-Interfaces
• Stationary Charge Radiation in Anisotropic Photonic Time Crystals
• Multiple actions of time-resolved short-pulsed metamaterials
• Spin-controlled photonics via temporal anisotropy
• Harnessing the natural resonances of time-varying dispersive interfaces
• Optimization-free Approach for Analog Filter Design through Spatial and Temporal Soft Switching of the Dielectric Constant
• Temporal refraction and reflection in modulated mechanical metabeams: theory and physical observation
• Inverse design of optical pulse shapes for time-varying photonics
• Spatiotemporal cascading of dielectric waveguides
• Analytic Inverse Design of Temporal Metamaterials via Space-Time Duality