Nonmagnetic Metamaterial Waveguides

Optical metamaterials provide exciting prospects for tackling fundamental challenges in photonics. A major opportunity lies in precisely manipulating light in integrated optics systems such as in sensors and optical circuitry. Such applications currently use photonic-band-gap materials or plasmon polaritons on material interfaces to benefit from strong light confinement. Unfortunately, plasmon-based waveguides suffer from a trade-off between the light’s confinement and its propagation range. For long-range applications, researchers have increasingly relied on the diverse optical properties of all-dielectric metamaterials. Can one design an optical device in a waveguide geometry using these dielectric metamaterials? This year, we proposed a design tool for dielectric metamaterial waveguides based on coordinate transformations. Our approach allows us to transform light trajectories along a two-dimensional plane until they conform to the needs of the application in question.