Non‐reciprocal metasurfaces for photonic integrated circuits

This proposal investigates nonlinear metasurface technology that exploits sharp Fano-resonances to engineer energy and size efficient photonic devices that perform better than the state-of-the art isolators, switches, and modulators. To circumvent the fundamental bounds of performance with single Fano-resonator isolators, this work will demonstrate novel isolators comprising of two stacked Fano-metasurfaces separated by a fused quartz spacer. The first generation of designs are based on a one-dimension silicon grating Fano-metasurface designed to operate at 1550 nm for TE-polarized light. Preliminary FEM simulations show that this device configuration can result in 66% transmission, 60-dB isolation, at a 20 MW/cm2 nonreciprocal intensity range (NRIR). Moving forward, the team will fabricate and experimentally validate Fano-isolator performance.