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NANOPHOTONICS

Chiral quantum optics goes electric

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 261–262 (2022)Cite this article

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The local polarization of light in nanophotonic waveguides changes with the light’s direction of propagation. By electrically controlling the polarization of optically created waveguide-coupled excitons in a two-dimensional semiconductor, researchers demonstrate voltage-controlled routing of photons in an integrated nanophotonic device.

Light is often considered as a transversely polarized electromagnetic wave, meaning that the electric field oscillates in a plane normal to the light’s direction of propagation. For circular polarization, the electric field rotates not unlike the propeller of an aircraft. When a light field is laterally confined, however, the electric field acquires a longitudinal component, along the direction of propagation. For strong confinement, like in a nanophotonic waveguide of sub-wavelength dimensions, this longitudinal component can be as large as the transverse one. Moreover, the longitudinal and transverse field components oscillate ±90° out of phase. This results in circular polarization in a plane that contains the direction of propagation, and the electric field behaves like a clockwise or counterclockwise spinning rotor of a helicopter. Remarkably, the sign of the 90° phase shift, which determines the sense of rotation, depends on the light’s propagation direction, forwards or backwards. This effect is referred to as spin-momentum locking of light1. It is at the heart of chiral quantum optics2 and gives rise to a propagation direction-dependent, or chiral, interaction between polarized emitters and guided modes in nanophotonic structures. In particular, it allows one to set the direction of emission into the waveguide via the polarization of the emitters. Such a polarization-controlled directional emission has been demonstrated, for example, with waveguide-coupled plasmonic emitters, atoms and quantum dots2. In all of these experiments, the polarization of the emitters was determined by the polarization of the excitation light, where the latter was set by means of an external polarization modulator.

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Fig. 1: Electrically tunable chiral waveguide interface.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Arno Rauschenbeutel & Philipp Schneeweiss

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  1. Arno Rauschenbeutel
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  2. Philipp Schneeweiss
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Correspondence to Arno Rauschenbeutel or Philipp Schneeweiss.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Rauschenbeutel, A., Schneeweiss, P. Chiral quantum optics goes electric. Nat. Photon. 16, 261–262 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-00982-4

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