Plasmonic metamaterial time crystal
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908932263378944 |
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| author | Guo, Tingwen Sueiro, Jules Andolina, Gian Marcello Levchuk, Artem Ponzoni, Stefano Grasset, Romain Monthe, Donald Aupiais, Ian Daineka, Dmitri Briatico, Javier de Oliveira, Thales VAG Ponomaryov, Alexey Arshad, Atiqa Karimbana-Kandy, Arjun Prajapati, Gulloo Lal Ilyakov, Igor Deinert, Jan-Christoph Maehrlein, Sebastian F. Perfetti, Luca Schiro, Marco Laplace, Yannis |
| author_facet | Guo, Tingwen Sueiro, Jules Andolina, Gian Marcello Levchuk, Artem Ponzoni, Stefano Grasset, Romain Monthe, Donald Aupiais, Ian Daineka, Dmitri Briatico, Javier de Oliveira, Thales VAG Ponomaryov, Alexey Arshad, Atiqa Karimbana-Kandy, Arjun Prajapati, Gulloo Lal Ilyakov, Igor Deinert, Jan-Christoph Maehrlein, Sebastian F. Perfetti, Luca Schiro, Marco Laplace, Yannis |
| contents | Periodically driven optical materials and metamaterials have recently emerged as a promising platform for realizing photonic time crystals (PTCs), which are systems whose optical properties are strongly and periodically modulated on timescales comparable to the optical cycle of light. These time-varying structures are the temporal counterparts of spatial photonic crystals (SPCs), for which a large and periodic dielectric contrast is achieved spatially on wavelength scales. Just as SPCs have revolutionized control over light-matter interactions by engineering the photonic density of states in space, PTCs promise comparable breakthroughs from a fundamentally new perspective: a temporal one. However, harnessing such phenomena all-optically poses severe experimental challenges, as it requires order-unity modulation depths of a material's optical properties on ultrafast timescales comparable to the light cycle, a regime that has remained elusive to date. Here, we demonstrate the first all-optical realization of a photonic time crystal, achieved with a surface plasmon cavity metamaterial operating at Terahertz (THz) frequencies. We demonstrate strong (near-unity) and coherent (sub-optical cycle) periodic driving of the plasmonic metamaterial enabled by field-induced dynamical modulation of the carriers' kinetic energy and effective mass - reaching up to 80% of their rest mass. Our spectroscopic measurements reveal a transition into the PTC regime mediated by an exceptional point, at which two Floquet-driven optical eigenmodes coalesce. In the PTC regime, emergent gain is shown to reduce plasmonic losses by more than 50% and we predict plasmonic lasing to be within experimental reach. These results pave the way for temporal engineering of losses and light-matter interactions in plasmonic systems, and establish a robust new platform for time-domain photonics. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02845 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Plasmonic metamaterial time crystal Guo, Tingwen Sueiro, Jules Andolina, Gian Marcello Levchuk, Artem Ponzoni, Stefano Grasset, Romain Monthe, Donald Aupiais, Ian Daineka, Dmitri Briatico, Javier de Oliveira, Thales VAG Ponomaryov, Alexey Arshad, Atiqa Karimbana-Kandy, Arjun Prajapati, Gulloo Lal Ilyakov, Igor Deinert, Jan-Christoph Maehrlein, Sebastian F. Perfetti, Luca Schiro, Marco Laplace, Yannis Optics Other Condensed Matter Periodically driven optical materials and metamaterials have recently emerged as a promising platform for realizing photonic time crystals (PTCs), which are systems whose optical properties are strongly and periodically modulated on timescales comparable to the optical cycle of light. These time-varying structures are the temporal counterparts of spatial photonic crystals (SPCs), for which a large and periodic dielectric contrast is achieved spatially on wavelength scales. Just as SPCs have revolutionized control over light-matter interactions by engineering the photonic density of states in space, PTCs promise comparable breakthroughs from a fundamentally new perspective: a temporal one. However, harnessing such phenomena all-optically poses severe experimental challenges, as it requires order-unity modulation depths of a material's optical properties on ultrafast timescales comparable to the light cycle, a regime that has remained elusive to date. Here, we demonstrate the first all-optical realization of a photonic time crystal, achieved with a surface plasmon cavity metamaterial operating at Terahertz (THz) frequencies. We demonstrate strong (near-unity) and coherent (sub-optical cycle) periodic driving of the plasmonic metamaterial enabled by field-induced dynamical modulation of the carriers' kinetic energy and effective mass - reaching up to 80% of their rest mass. Our spectroscopic measurements reveal a transition into the PTC regime mediated by an exceptional point, at which two Floquet-driven optical eigenmodes coalesce. In the PTC regime, emergent gain is shown to reduce plasmonic losses by more than 50% and we predict plasmonic lasing to be within experimental reach. These results pave the way for temporal engineering of losses and light-matter interactions in plasmonic systems, and establish a robust new platform for time-domain photonics. |
| title | Plasmonic metamaterial time crystal |
| topic | Optics Other Condensed Matter |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02845 |