Wavefront shaping through emulated curved space in waveguide settings.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26899285.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms10747 and PMC identifier 4764892.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The past decade has witnessed remarkable progress in wavefront shaping, including shaping of beams in free space, of plasmonic wavepackets and of electronic wavefunctions. In all of these, the wavefront shaping was achieved by external means such as masks, gratings and reflection from metasurfaces. Here, we propose wavefront shaping by exploiting general relativity (GR) effects in waveguide settings. We demonstrate beam shaping within dielectric slab samples with predesigned refractive index varying so as to create curved space environment for light. We use this technique to construct very narrow non-diffracting beams and shape-invariant beams accelerating on arbitrary trajectories. Importantly, the beam transformations occur within a mere distance of 40 wavelengths, suggesting that GR can inspire any wavefront shaping in highly tight waveguide settings. In such settings, we demonstrate Einstein's Rings: a phenomenon dating back to 1936.