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Observation of trapped light within the radiation continuum

Abstract

The ability to confine light is important both scientifically and technologically. Many light confinement methods exist, but they all achieve confinement with materials or systems that forbid outgoing waves. These systems can be implemented by metallic mirrors, by photonic band-gap materials1, by highly disordered media (Anderson localization2) and, for a subset of outgoing waves, by translational symmetry (total internal reflection1) or by rotational or reflection symmetry3,4. Exceptions to these examples exist only in theoretical proposals5,6,7,8. Here we predict and show experimentally that light can be perfectly confined in a patterned dielectric slab, even though outgoing waves are allowed in the surrounding medium. Technically, this is an observation of an ‘embedded eigenvalue’9—namely, a bound state in a continuum of radiation modes—that is not due to symmetry incompatibility5,6,7,8,10,11,12,13,14,15,16. Such a bound state can exist stably in a general class of geometries in which all of its radiation amplitudes vanish simultaneously as a result of destructive interference. This method to trap electromagnetic waves is also applicable to electronic12 and mechanical waves14,15.

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Figure 1: Predictions of the theory.
Figure 2: Fabricated PhC slab and the measurement setup.
Figure 3: Detection of resonances from reflectivity data.
Figure 4: Quantitative evidence on the disappearance of leakage.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Lu, O. Shapira and Y. Shen for discussions. This work was partly supported by the Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies under contract no. W911NF-07-D0004. B.Z., J.L. (fabrication) and M.S. were partly supported by S3TEC, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy under grant no. DE-SC0001299. S.-L.C. and J.L. were also partly supported by the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers of the National Science Foundation under grant no. DMR-0819762.

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C.W.H., B.Z., S.-L.C., J.D.J. and M.S. conceived the idea of this study. C.W.H. performed numerical simulations. C.W.H. and B.Z. conducted the measurement and analysis. J.L. fabricated the sample. S.G.J. proposed the Fourier-coefficient explanation. M.S. and J.D.J. supervised the project. C.W.H. wrote the paper with input from all authors.

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Correspondence to Chia Wei Hsu.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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This file contains Supplementary Equations, Supplementary Discussion, additional references and Supplementary Figures 1 and 2. (PDF 172 kb)

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Hsu, C., Zhen, B., Lee, J. et al. Observation of trapped light within the radiation continuum. Nature 499, 188–191 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12289

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