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A moving medium drags light along with it as measured by Fizeau and explained by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Here we show that the same effect can be obtained in a situation where there is no physical motion of the medium. Modulations of both the permittivity and permeability, phased in space and time in the form of traveling waves, are the basis of our model. Space–time metamaterials are represented by effective bianisotropic parameters, which can in turn be mapped to a moving homogeneous medium. Hence these metamaterials mimic a relativistic effect without the need for any actual material motion. We discuss how both the permittivity and permeability need to be modulated to achieve these effects, and we present an equivalent transmission line model.

An Archimedes’ Screw captures water, feeding energy into it by lifting it to a higher level. We introduce the first instance of an optical Archimedes’ Screw, and demonstrate how this system is capable of capturing light, dragging it and amplifying it. We unveil new exact analytic solutions to Maxwell’s Equations for a wide family of chiral space-time media, and show their potential to achieve chirally selective amplification within widely tunable parity-time-broken phases. Our work, which may be readily implemented via pump-probe experiments with circularly polarized beams, opens a new direction in the physics of time-varying media by merging the rising field of space-time metamaterials and that of chiral systems, and offers a new playground for topological and non-Hermitian photonics, with potential applications to chiral spectroscopy and sensing. An Archimedes’ screw pumps energy into a fluid by lifting it to a higher ground. An optical screw uses helical space-time modulations in the properties of a material to grab hold of and amplify circularly polarized light of a specific handedness.

The existence of topologically protected edge modes is often cited as a highly desirable trait of topological insulators. However, these edge states are not always present. A realistic physical treatment of long-range hopping in a one-dimensional dipolar system can break the symmetry that protects the edge modes without affecting the bulk topological number, leading to a breakdown in bulk-edge correspondence (BEC). Hence, it is important to gain a better understanding of where and how this occurs, as well as how to measure it. Here we examine the behaviour of the bulk and edge modes in a dimerised chain of metallic nanoparticles and in a simpler non-Hermitian next-nearest-neighbour model to provide some insights into the phenomena of bulk-edge breakdown. We construct BEC phase diagrams for the simpler case and use these ideas to devise a measure of symmetry-breaking for the plasmonic system based on its bulk properties. This provides a parameter regime in which BEC is preserved in the topological plasmonic chain, as well as a framework for assessing this phenomenon in other systems.

One of the most striking predictions of quantum electrodynamics is that vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field can lead to spontaneous emission of atoms as well as photon-mediated interactions among them. Since these processes strongly depend on the nature of the photonic bath, a current burgeoning field is the study of their modification in the presence of photons with non-trivial energy dispersions, e.g. the ones confined in photonic crystals. A remarkable example is the case of isotropic Dirac-photons, which has been recently shown to lead to non-exponential spontaneous emission as well as dissipation-less long-range emitter interactions. In this work, we show how to further tune these processes by considering anisotropic Dirac cone dispersions, which include tilted, semi-Dirac, and the recently discovered type II and III Dirac points. In particular, we show how by changing the anisotropy of the lattice one can change both the spatial shape of the interactions as well as its coherent/incoherent nature. Finally, we theoretically analyze a possible implementation based on subwavelength atomic arrays where these energy dispersions can be engineered and interfaced with quantum emitters.

Here, we introduce the concept of magnetic localized surface plasmons (LSPs), magnetic dipole modes that are supported by cylindrical metal structures corrugated by very long, curved grooves. The resonance wavelength is dictated by the length of the grooves, allowing us to tune it to values much larger than the size of the particle. Moreover, magnetic LSPs also exist for extremely thin metal disks and, therefore, they could be used to devise metasurfaces with magnetic functionalities. Experimental evidence of the existence of these magnetic LSPs in the microwave regime is also presented, although the concept is very general and could be applied to terahertz or infrared frequencies.

Coupled light-matter modes supported by plasmonic metasurfaces can be combined with topological principles to yield subwavelength topological valley states of light. This study gives a systematic presentation of the topological valley states available for lattices of metallic nanoparticles (NPs): all possible lattices with hexagonal symmetry are considered as well as valley states emerging on a square lattice. Several unique effects that have yet to be explored in plasmonics are identified, such as robust guiding, filtering, and splitting of modes, as well as dual-band effects. These are demonstrated by means of scattering computations based on the coupled dipole method that encompass full electromagnetic interactions between NPs.

Time-varying media have recently emerged as a new paradigm for wave manipulation, due to the synergy between the discovery of highly nonlinear materials, such as epsilon-near-zero materials, and the quest for wave applications, such as magnet-free nonreciprocity, multimode light shaping, and ultrafast switching. In this review, we provide a comprehensive discussion of the recent progress achieved with photonic metamaterials whose properties stem from their modulation in time. We review the basic concepts underpinning temporal switching and its relation with spatial scattering and deploy the resulting insight to review photonic time-crystals and their emergent research avenues, such as topological and non-Hermitian physics. We then extend our discussion to account for spatiotemporal modulation and its applications to nonreciprocity, synthetic motion, giant anisotropy, amplification, and many other effects. Finally, we conclude with a review of the most attractive experimental avenues recently demonstrated and provide a few perspectives on emerging trends for future implementations of time-modulation in photonics.

Singular graphene metasurfaces, conductivity gratings realized by periodically suppressing the local doping level of a graphene sheet, were recently proposed to efficiently harvest THz light and couple it to surface plasmons over broad absorption bands, thereby achieving remarkably high field enhancement. However, the large momentum wavevectors thus attained are sensitive to the nonlocal behavior of the underlying electron liquid. Here, we extend the theory of singular graphene metasurfaces to account for the full nonlocal optical response of graphene and discuss the resulting impact on the plasmon resonance spectrum. Finally, we propose a simple local-analogue model that is able to reproduce the effect of nonlocality in local-response calculations by introducing a constant conductivity offset, which could prove a valuable tool in the modeling of more complex experimental graphene-based platforms.

Surface plasmons polaritons (SPPs) at metal/dielectric interfaces have raised lots of expectations in the on-going quest towards scaling down optical devices. SPP optics offers a powerful and flexible platform for real two-dimensional integrated optics, capable of supporting both light and electrons. Yet, a full exploitation of the features of SPPs is conditioned by an accurate control of their flow. Most efforts have so far focused on the extrapolation of concepts borrowed from guided optics. This strategy has already led to many important breakthroughs but a fully deterministic control of SPP modes remains a challenge. Recently, the field of optics was stimulated by a novel paradigm, transformation optics, which offers the capability to control light flow in any desired fashion. While it has already significantly contributed to the design of metamaterials with unprecedented optical properties, its versatility offers new opportunities towards a fully deterministic control of SPPs and the design of a new class of plasmonic functionalities. Here, we review recent progress in the application of transformation optics to SPPs. We first briefly describe the theoretical formalism of , focusing on its specificities over its three-dimensional optical counterpart. Numerical simulations are then used to illustrate its capability to tame SPP flows at a metal interface patterned with a dielectric load. Finally, we review recent experimental implementations leading to unique SPP functionalities at optical frequencies.