Semi-guided light propagation across linear folds of slab waveguides is being considered. Radiation losses vanish beyond certain critical angles of incidence, as can be understood by arguments resembling Snell's law. One thus realizes lossless propagation through 90-degree corner configurations, where the remaining guided waves are still subject to pronounced reflection and polarization conversion. A step-like system of two of these sharp corners can then be viewed as a system akin to a Fabry-Perot interferometer, with two partial reflectors at a distance given by the vertical separation of the slab cores. The respective resonance effect enables full transmission of semiguided, laterally plane waves through the step structures. One obtains a configuration that optically connects guiding layers at different elevation levels in a 3-D integrated optical chip, without radiation losses, over large distances, and reasonably broadband. We show rigorous quasi-analytical results for typical high-contrast Si/SiO2 structures. Although the full-transmission effect requires a symmetric system, here realized by slab waveguides with a silicon core sandwiched between thick silica substrate and cover layers, simulations for configurations with air cover show that a certain asymmetry can well be afforded.
Optical and infrared antennas provide a promising way to couple photons in and out of nanoscale structures. As counterpart to conventional radio antennas, they are able to increase optical fields in sub-wavelength volumes, to enhance excitation and emission of quantum emitters or to direct light, radiated by quantum emitters. The directed emission of these antennas has been mainly pursued by surface plasmon based devices, e.g. Yagi-Uda like antennas, which are rather complicated due to the coupling of several metallic particles. Also, like all metallic structures in optical or infrared regime, these devices are very sensitive to fabrication tolerances and are affected by strong losses. It has been shown recently, that such directed emission can be accomplished by dielectric materials as well.
In this paper we present an optimization of nanoscopic antennas in the near infrared regime starting from a metallic Yagi-Uda structure. The optimization is done via a particle-swarm algorithm, using full time domain finite integration simulations to obtain the characteristics of the investigated structure, also taking into account substrates. Furthermore we present a dielectric antenna, which performs even better, due to the lack of losses by an appropriate choice of the dielectric material. These antennas are robust concerning fabrication tolerances and can be realized with different materials for both the antenna and the substrate, without using high index materials.
High harmonic generation is investigated for a two-band model of a semiconductor nanostructure. Similar to
an atomic two-level system, the semiconductor emits high harmonic radiation. We show how one can specifically
enhance the emission for a given frequency by applying a non-trivially shaped laser pulse. Therefore,
the semiconductor Bloch equations including the interband and additionally the intraband dynamics are solved
numerically and the spectral shape of the input pulse is computed via an optimization algorithm. It is demonstrated
that desired emission frequencies can be favored even though the overall input power is kept constant.
We also suggest special metallic nano geometries to achieve enhanced localized optical fields. They are found by
geometric optimization.
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