Structured Materials and Structured Light for Quantum Photonics

Joint Meeting with Boston Chapter, IEEE Photonics Society

 This presentation reviews two developing and related themes in photonics. One is the development of metamaterials and metasurfaces. Metamaterials can possess properties that are qualitatively dissimilar from those of naturally occurring materials, such as possessing a negative value of the refractive index. These materials can also have exotic and very large nonlinear optics properties. Metasurfaces can be designed to be extremely sensitive to the handedness of circularly polarized light, and can be designed such that the light diffracted from the surface possesses exotic and controllable wavefront structures. These structured light beams have recently been shown to possess exotic properties of their own, such as vacuum propagation velocities differing from the light velocity c for plane waves. These beams can also be tailored in such a way that they carry orbital angular momentum, which can be used to apply a torque to mechanical objects and as a carrier of information in a classical and quantum telecommunication systems.