Iowa State University Research Foundation Inc

Other

Thomas Koschny

Costas M Soukoulis

Martin Wegener

Gary L Tuttle

Jigang Wang

Philippe Tassin

Liang Luo

Jiangfeng Zhou

Lei Zhang

Provided are systems and methods to generate single-cycle THz pulses from a few tens of nanometers thin layer of split ring resonators (SRRs) via optical rectification of femtosecond laser pulses. The emitted THz radiation, with a spectrum ranging from about 0.1 to 4 THz, arises exclusively from pumping the magnetic-dipole resonance of SRRs around 200 THz. This resonant enhancement, together with pump polarization dependence and power scaling of the THz emission, underpins the nonlinearity from optically induced circulating currents in SRRs, with a huge effective nonlinear susceptibility of 0.8&#xd7;10m/V that far exceeds surface nonlinearities of both thin films and bulk organic/inorganic crystals and sheet nonlinearities of non-centrosymmetric materials such as ZnTe.

Broadband terahertz generation of metamaterials

An apparatus, system, and method to counteract group velocity dispersion in fibers, or any other propagation of electromagnetic signals at any wavelength (microwave, terahertz, optical, etc.) in any other medium. A dispersion compensation step or device based on dispersion-engineered metamaterials is included and avoids the need of a long section of specialty fiber or the need for Bragg gratings (which have insertion loss).

Dispersion management with metamaterials

The invention provides simplified negative index materials (NIMs) using wire-pair structures, 4-gap single ring split-ring resonator (SRR), fishnet structures and overleaf capacitor SRR. In the wire-pair arrangement, a pair of short parallel wires and continuous wires are used. In the 4-gap single-ring SRR, the SRRs are centered on the faces of a cubic unit cell combined with a continuous wire type resonator. Combining both elements creates a frequency band where the metamaterial is transparent with simultaneously negative &#x2208; and &#x3bc;. In the fishnet structure, a metallic mesh on both sides of the dielectric spacer is used. The overleaf capacitor SRR changes the gap capacities to small plate capacitors by making the sections of the SRR ring overlap at the gaps separated by a thin dielectric film. This technique is applicable to conventional SRR gaps but it best deploys for the 4-gap single-ring structures.

Structures with negative index of refraction

Growing community of inventors

Ames, IA, United States of America

Thomas Koschny