Quantum metamaterials and quantum optics with metamaterials

Mahi R. Singh

Yunxia, Dong, Xiaohua +1 more

Nikolay I. Zheludev

Pankaj Kumar Jha

Metamaterials are artificial materials with exotic physical, chemical and optical properties not found in natural materials. In the past decade they have attracted monumental attention from the scientific community owing to their applications ranging from physics to engineering. However, the conventional solid-state metamaterial platforms suffer from inevitable optical loss, defects which severely curtain their application at few-photon level. The quest for quantum optical applications with metamaterial-based technologies has stimulated researchers to engineer novel lossless materials and construct new platforms. Recently, by integrating two important and timely realms of science − trapped atom physics and metamaterials −, we proposed and theoretically demonstrated a topologically reconfigurable and lossless quantum metamaterial. The atomic lattice quantum metamaterial is immune to aforementioned critical challenges and can be employed at a single-photon level. Moreover, in stark contrast to conventional solid-state platforms, optical lattices provide the necessary freedom to precisely localize (within few nanometer of uncertainty) a probe atom, inside the atomic lattice quantum metamaterial to harness its exotic optical properties. In addition to its aforementioned novel characteristics, our atomic lattice quantum metamaterial offers a unique degree of freedom, namely all-optical control on ultrafast time scales over the photonic topological transition of isofrequency contours using weak fields, not possible with previous solid-state platforms. In this work, we leverage the tools, techniques, scientific advances in the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics, integrated with the concepts used in metamaterials to propose and theoretically demonstrate a novel platform towards quantum metamaterial with novel functionalities by bringing together the best of two worlds.

Didier Felbacq, Emmanuel Rousseau

Abstract Metamaterials made of periodic collections of dielectric nanorods are considered theoretically. When quantum resonators are embedded within the nanorods, one obtains a quantum metamaterial, whose electromagnetic properties depend upon the state of the quantum resonators. The theoretical model predicts that when the resonators are pumped and reach the inversion regime, the quantum metamaterial exhibits an all‐optical switchable conduction band. The phenomenon can be described by considering the pole stucture of the scattering matrix of the metamaterial.

Ehsan Amooghorban, Martijn Wubs

The quantum optics of metamaterials starts with the question of whether the same effective-medium theories apply as in classical optics. In general, the answer is negative. For active plasmonics but also for some passive metamaterials, we show that an additional effective-medium parameter is indispensable besides the effective index, namely, the effective noise-photon distribution. Only with the extra parameter can one predict how well the quantumness of states of light is preserved in the metamaterial. The fact that the effective index alone is not always sufficient and that one additional effective parameter suffices in the quantum optics of metamaterials is both of fundamental and practical interest. Here, from a Lagrangian description of the quantum electrodynamics of media with both linear gain and loss, we compute the effective noise-photon distribution for quantum light propagation in arbitrary directions in layered metamaterials, thereby detailing and generalizing our previous work. The effective index with its direction and polarization dependence is the same as in classical effective-medium theories. As our main result, we derive both for passive and for active media how the value of the effective noise-photon distribution too depends on the polarization and propagation directions of the light. Interestingly, for s-polarized light incident on passive metamaterials, the noise-photon distribution reduces to a thermal distribution, but for p-polarized light it does not. We illustrate the robustness of our quantum optical effective-medium theory by accurate predictions both for power spectra and for balanced homodyne detection of output quantum states of the metamaterial.