Abstract
Magneto-optical phenomena such as the Faraday and Kerr effects play a central role in controlling the polarization and intensity of optical fields propagating through a medium. Intensity effects in which the direction of light emission depends on the orientation of the external magnetic field are of particular interest, as they can be harnessed for routing light. Effects known so far for accomplishing such routing all control light emission along the axis parallel to the magnetic field. Here we report a new class of emission phenomena where directionality is established perpendicular to the externally applied magnetic field for light sources located in the vicinity of a surface. As a proof of principle for this effect, which we call transverse magnetic routing of light emission, we demonstrate the routing of emission for excitons in a diluted-magnetic-semiconductor quantum well. In hybrid plasmonic semiconductor structures, we observe significantly enhanced directionality of up to 60%.
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Change history
04 September 2018
In the version of this Article originally published, the expression for Pc was missing a division slash; it should have read Pc = ±2dydz/(dy2 + dz2) ≈ ±2/3Δh,F/Δ1h. Also, affiliation 5 was missing ‘Institute of Physics’; it should have read ‘International Research Centre MagTop, Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland’. These issues have now been corrected.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to M. M. Glazov, E. L. Ivchenko, V. L. Korenev, I. V. Iorsh and A. K. Samusev for useful discussions. We acknowledge the financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the International Collaborative Research Centre 160 (Project C5). A.N.P. acknowledges the partial financial support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research grants no. 15-52-12012-NNIO_a and 15-52-12011-NNIO_a and the “Basis” Foundation. M.B. acknowledges support by RF Government grant no. 14.Z50.31.0021. The research in Poland was partially supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) through grant nos DEC-2012/06/A/ST3/00247 and DEC-2014/14/M/ST3/00484, as well as by the Foundation for Polish Science through the IRA Programme co-financed by EU within SG OP.
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F.S., I.A.A., V.F.S, L.K. and L.E.K. performed the experiments and analysed the data. A.N.P. developed the theoretical model. L.V.L. and R.J. carried out electron beam lithography and lift-off processing for plasmonic gratings. G.K., M.W. and T.W. fabricated the semiconductor samples. F.S., A.N.P, I.A.A., D.R.Y. and M.B. conceived the idea for the experiment and co-wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Spitzer, F., Poddubny, A.N., Akimov, I.A. et al. Routing the emission of a near-surface light source by a magnetic field. Nature Phys 14, 1043–1048 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0232-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0232-7
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