Nonlinear Antennas with Tunable Radiation Patterns in Near Infrared

Abstract

Abstract: Various optical antennas have been proposed to control the radiation pattern in a linear manner. Furthermore, the larger nonlinearity will play a vital role, and will change the refractive index of the antenna, thereby changing the radiation pattern. By modifying the effective mass of electrons in Drude model, it can be obtained that the refractive index of ITO film changes with the optical field intensity, and provides the nonlinear refractive index as a function of frequency and intensity. Nanoantennas made of indium tin oxide (ITO) will exhibit strong Kerr effect. The linear and nonlinear responses of ITO antennas was studied, the Kerr effect of ITO was used to control the radiation pattern of the antenna. Based on this model, a nonlinear optical antenna was designed to achieve tunable radiation pattern covering a broad near infrared band (1 000 nm to 1 650 nm). Moreover, a hybrid nonlinear antenna was demonstrated, composed of ITO and silicon (Si), which can control the radiation pattern more efficiency. This work breaks through the limitation that the strong nonlinear refractive index coefficient of nonlinear material only occurs at specific resonance frequency or the zero refractive index point. Our study provides a novel approach toward ultrafast dynamical control of metamaterials, for applications such as beam steering and optical modulation.

Key words: Kerr effect, optical antenna, multipole expansion, indium tin oxide (ITO), far-field radiation

CLC Number:

O437

CHENG Lin, ZHANG Lei. Nonlinear Antennas with Tunable Radiation Patterns in Near Infrared[J]. Journal of Synthetic Crystals, 2021, 50(7): 1356-1361.

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