Quantum photonic metamaterials and quantum phenomena in metamaterials

Nikolay I. Zheludev

Nikolay I. Zheludev

Nikolay I. Zheludev

Tomer Stav, Arkady Faerman, Elhanan Maguid +4 more

Metamaterials constructed from deep subwavelength building blocks have been used to demonstrate phenomena ranging from negative refractive index and ε-near-zero to cloaking, emulations of general relativity, and superresolution imaging. More recently, metamaterials have been suggested as a new platform for quantum optics. We present the use of a dielectric metasurface to generate entanglement between the spin and orbital angular momentum of photons. We demonstrate the generation of the four Bell states on a single photon by using the geometric phase that arises from the photonic spin-orbit interaction and subsequently show nonlocal correlations between two photons that interacted with the metasurface. Our results show that metamaterials are suitable for the generation and manipulation of entangled photon states, introducing the area of quantum optics metamaterials.

Nikolay I. Zheludev

Yang Ming, Wang Zhang, Jie Ying Tang +4 more

Abstract Metamaterials consisting of deep subwavelength artificial “atoms” have been utilized to demonstrate a series of novel phenomena such as negative refraction and epsilon‐near‐zero. In recent times, metamaterials have been developed as an up‐and‐coming platform for quantum optics. Here the generation and modulation of photonic entanglement are investigated based on the parametric down conversion processes in metamaterials with considerable optical nonlinearity. Through flexible nanostructure design, the nonlinear photonic interaction in the metamaterial system can be effectively tailored. The distributions of optical parameters of the system are inhomogeneous, based on which the spatial properties of the generated photonic state can be steered as desired. The theoretical framework to describe this system is established based on the nonlinear Huygens–Fresnel principle, and a differential approach is utilized to deal with the intrinsic loss of the system. The generation of orbital angular momentum entangled states is actually considered as an illustration. This platform could be valuable for the practical applications of quantum information processing.