Abstract
Diffraction, a fundamental process in wave physics, leads to spreading of the optical beams as they propagate. However, new photonic crystal (PhC) meta-materials can be nano-engineered to generate extreme anisotropy, resulting in apparent propagation of light without diffraction. This surprising phenomenon, called supercollimation, effectively freezes the spatial width of a light beam inside a PhC, observed over a few isotropic diffraction-lengths1,2,3,4,5,6. However, using such experiments to predict the behaviour for longer propagation lengths is difficult, as a tiny error in a measured width can extrapolate to order unity uncertainty in the width at distances over hundreds of diffraction-lengths. Here, supercollimation is demonstrated in a macroscopic PhC system over centimetre-scale distances, retaining spatial width confinement without the need for waveguides or nonlinearities. Through quantitative studies of the beam evolution in a two-dimensional PhC, we find that supercollimation possesses unexpected but inherent robustness with respect to short-scale disorder such as fabrication roughness, enabling supercollimation over 600 isotropic diffraction-lengths. The effects of disorder are identified through experiments and understood through rigorous simulations. In addition, a supercollimation steering capability is proposed.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center Program of the National Science Foundation, in the Interconnect Focus Center Research Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation (MARCO), its participating companies, DARPA, Department of Defence (ONR) MURI and by AFOSR. We gratefully acknowledge Sensors Unlimited for the donation of an infrared camera. M.S.D. is supported by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT).
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Rakich, P., Dahlem, M., Tandon, S. et al. Achieving centimetre-scale supercollimation in a large-area two-dimensional photonic crystal. Nature Mater 5, 93–96 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1568
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1568
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