Authors:
Giulia Crotti
1
;
2
;
Mert Akturk
1
;
Andrea Schirato
1
;
2
;
Vincent Vinel
3
;
Remo Proietti Zaccaria
2
;
4
;
Margherita Maiuri
1
;
5
;
Anton Trifonov
6
;
Ivan Buchvarov
6
;
7
;
Dragomir Neshev
8
;
Giuseppe Leo
3
;
Giulio Cerullo
1
;
5
and
Giuseppe Della Valle
1
;
5
;
9
Affiliations:
1
Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy
;
2
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16163, Genova, Italy
;
3
Laboratoire Matériaux et Phénomènes Quantiques, MPQ UMR 7162, Université de Paris, CNRS, 75013, Paris, France
;
4
Cixi Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Ningbo Institute of Industrial Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo 315201, China
;
5
IFN, Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, 20133, Milano, Italy
;
6
John Atanasoff Center for Bio and Nano Photonics (JAC BNP), 1164 Sofia, Bulgaria
;
7
Faculty of Physics, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, 5 James Bourchier Boulevard, 1164 Sofia, Bulgaria
;
8
ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), Research School of Physics, Australian National University, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia
;
9
INFN, Sezione di Milano, I-20133 Milano, Italy
Keyword(s):
Ultrafast Photonics, All-Optical Polarization Control, Reconfigurable Metasurfaces.
Abstract:
The ability to manipulate light polarization at an ultrafast speed is a challenging goal in the field of Photonics: sub-picosecond control of polarization is a fundamental functionality for a variety of applications, including the developement of free-space optical links for robust information encoding. To this aim, an important paradigm consists in employing metasurfaces as platforms which can be reconfigurable by all-optical means, i.e. upon illumination by an energetic femtosecond laser pulse. Here, we present giant all-optical modulations of dichroism in an anisotropic AlGaAs metasurface. An optimized design allows to exploit a sharp extended resonance of the nanostructure in the desired spectral range, where the pump-induced band-filling effect is the dominant process presiding over the ultrafast change of permittivity.