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Optical negative refraction by four-wave mixing in thin metallic nanostructures

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 34–38 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

The law of refraction first derived by Snellius and later introduced as the Huygens–Fermat principle1, states that the incidence and refracted angles of a light wave at the interface of two different materials are related to the ratio of the refractive indices in each medium. Whereas all natural materials have a positive refractive index and therefore exhibit refraction in the positive direction, artificially engineered negative index metamaterials have been shown capable of bending light waves negatively2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Such a negative refractive index is the key to achieving a perfect lens that is capable of imaging well below the diffraction limit9,10,11. However, negative index metamaterials are typically lossy, narrow band, and require complicated fabrication processes. Recently, an alternative approach to obtain negative refraction from a very thin nonlinear film has been proposed12,13 and experimentally demonstrated in the microwave region14,15,16. However, such approaches use phase conjugation, which makes optical implementations difficult. Here, we report a simple but different scheme to demonstrate experimentally nonlinear negative refraction at optical frequencies using four-wave mixing in nanostructured metal films. The refractive index can be designed at will by simply tuning the wavelengths of the interacting waves, which could have potential impact on many important applications, such as superlens imaging.

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Figure 1: Schematics of the degenerate 4WM process on a thin nonlinear film.
Figure 2: Fourier plane of the detected signals.
Figure 3: Four-wave mixing analysis.
Figure 4: Top view schematic of the experiment and the corresponding experimental images collected by a CCD positioned at the imaging plane.
Figure 5: Fourier plane images of the detected signal.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding support from the US Army Research Office (MURI W911NF-09-1-0539).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NSF Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC), 3112 Etcheverry Hall, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Stefano Palomba, Shuang Zhang, Yongshik Park, Guy Bartal, Xiaobo Yin & Xiang Zhang

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

    Shuang Zhang

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion, 32000 Haifa, Israel

    Guy Bartal

  4. Material Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Xiaobo Yin & Xiang Zhang

Authors
  1. Stefano Palomba
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  6. Xiang Zhang
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Contributions

S.P. conducted the measurements. S.P. and S.Z. performed numerical simulations. Y.P. fabricated the samples. S.P., G.B., X.Y., S.Z. and X.Z. analysed the experimental data and wrote the manuscript. X.Z., X.Y. and G.B. guided the research. All authors contributed to discussions.

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Correspondence to Xiang Zhang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Palomba, S., Zhang, S., Park, Y. et al. Optical negative refraction by four-wave mixing in thin metallic nanostructures. Nature Mater 11, 34–38 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3148

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