Light guiding, bending, and splitting via local modification of interfaces of a photonic waveguide

Using Thin Films of Phase-Change Material for Active Tuning of Terahertz Waves Scattering on Dielectric Cylinders

The scattering of electromagnetic waves by isotropic dielectric cylinders can be dramatically modified by means of vanadium dioxide (VO2) thin-film coatings. Efficient dynamic control of scattering is achieved due to the variations in material parameters realizable by means of external biasing. In this paper, we study the scattering of terahertz waves in a case where the coating shells are made of VO2, a phase-change material, whose thin films may work rather as electromagnetic phase screens in the insulator material phase, but as lossy quasi-metallic components in the metallic material phase. The shells that uniformly cover the dielectric cylinders are investigated. Attention will be paid to the demonstration of the potential of VO2 in the external control of diverse scattering regimes of the dielectric-VO2 core-shell scatterer, while conductivity of VO2 corresponds to rather insignificant variations in temperature. In line with the purposes of this work, it is shown that the different resonant and nonresonant regimes have different sensitivity to the variations in VO2 conductivity. Both the total scattering cross section and field distributions inside and around the core are studied, as well as the angle-dependent scattering cross section.

Evidence of asymmetric beaming in a piecewise-linear propagation channel

Asymmetric beaming in a piecewise-linear propagation channel is demonstrated for a single photonic-crystal prism at Gaussian-beam illumination. The used hybrid refraction-diffraction mechanism exploits oblique incidence, the first-negative-order deflection at the longer interface, and asymmetry in coupling at the exit interfaces and does not need blocking of transmission by dispersion in the backward illumination case. The Floquet-Bloch mode with left-handed behavior and nearly circular equifrequency dispersion contours is utilized. The outgoing waves may have significantly different spatial distributions for the forward and backward illumination cases, yielding asymmetry in the beaming regime.