The concept of magnetic nanoprobes (or magnetic nanoantennas), their excitation, and the capability of providing a magnetic near-field enhancement and vanishing electric field is presented and investigated. It is established that a particular type of cylindrical vector beam called an azimuthally electric polarized vector beam yields a strong longitudinal magnetic field on the beam axis where the electric field is ideally null. These beams, with an electric polarization vortex and cylindrical symmetry, are important in generating high magnetic to electric field contrast, i.e., large local field admittance, and in allowing selective excitation of magnetic transitions in matter located on the beam axis. We demonstrate that azimuthally polarized vector beam excitation of a photoinduced magnetic nanoprobe made of a magnetically polarizable nanocluster leads to an enhanced magnetic near field with resolution beyond the diffraction limit. We introduce two figures of merit, magnetic field enhancement and local field admittance normalized to that of a plane wave, that are useful to classify magnetic nanoprobes and their excitation. The performance of magnetic nanoprobes and azimuthal polarized beams is quantified in comparison to other illumination schemes and with several defect scenarios. The proposed probes may be useful in spectroscopy and scanning probe microscopy applications.

We propose a new principle of operation in vacuum electron-beam-based oscillators that leads to a low beam current for starting oscillations. The principle is based on supersynchronous operation of an electron beam interacting with four degenerate electromagnetic modes in a slow-wave structure (SWS). The four-mode supersynchronous regime is associated with a very special degeneracy condition in the dispersion diagram of a cold periodic SWS called degenerate band edge (DBE). This regime features a giant group delay in the finite-length SWS and low starting-oscillation beam current. The starting beam current is at least an order of magnitude smaller compared with a conventional backward-wave oscillator of the same length. As a representative example, we consider an SWS conceived by a periodically loaded metallic waveguide supporting a DBE and investigate starting-oscillation conditions using the Pierce theory generalized to coupled transmission lines. The proposed supersynchronism regime can be straightforwardly adapted to waveguide geometries others than the periodically loaded waveguide considered here since DBE is a general property that can be realized in a variety of structures.

We propose a new amplification regime based on a synchronous operation of four degenerate electromagnetic (EM) modes in a slow-wave structure and the electron beam, referred to as super synchronization. These four EM modes arise in a Fabry-Pérot cavity when degenerate band edge (DBE) condition is satisfied. The modes interact constructively with the electron beam resulting in superior amplification. In particular, much larger gains are achieved for smaller beam currents compared to conventional structures based on synchronization with only a single EM mode. We demonstrate giant gain scaling with respect to the length of the slow-wave structure compared to conventional Pierce type single mode traveling wave tube amplifiers. We construct a coupled transmission line model for a loaded waveguide slow-wave structure exhibiting a DBE, and investigate the phenomenon of giant gain via super synchronization using the Pierce model generalized to multimode interaction.

An azimuthally electric-polarized vector beam (APB), with a polarization vortex, has a salient feature that it contains a magnetic-dominant region within which the electric field is ideally null while the longitudinal magnetic field is maximum. Fresnel diffraction theory and plane-wave spectral calculations are applied to quantify field features of such a beam upon focusing through a lens. The diffraction-limited full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of the beam's longitudinal magnetic field intensity profile and complementary FWHM of the beam's annular-shaped total electric field intensity profile are examined at the lens's focal plane as a function of the lens's paraxial focal distance. Then, we place a subwavelength dense dielectric Mie scatterer in the minimum-waist plane of a self-standing converging APB and demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that a very-high-resolution magnetic near-field at optical frequency is achieved with total magnetic near-field FWHM of 0.23λ (i.e., magnetic near-field spot area of 0.04λ2) within a magnetic-dominant region located one radius (0.12λ) away from the scatterer. In particular, the utilization of the nanosphere as a magnetic nanoantenna (so-called magnetic nanoprobe) illuminated by a tightly focused APB is instrumental in boosting the photoin duced magnetic response and suppressing the electric response of a sample matter. The access to the weak photoinduced magnetic response in sample matter would add extra degrees of freedom to future optical photo induced force microscopy and spectroscopy systems based on the excitation of photoinduced magnetic dipolar transitions.

We propose a class of lasers based on a fourth-order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) referred to as the degenerate band edge (DBE). EPDs have been found in parity-time-symmetric photonic structures that require loss and/or gain; here we show that the DBE is a different kind of EPD since it occurs in periodic structures that are lossless and gainless. Because of this property, a small level of gain is sufficient to induce single-frequency lasing based on a synchronous operation of four degenerate Floquet-Bloch eigenwaves. This lasing scheme constitutes a light-matter interaction mechanism that leads also to a unique scaling law of the laser threshold with the inverse of the fifth power of the laser-cavity length. The DBE laser has the lowest lasing threshold in comparison to a regular band edge laser and to a conventional laser in cavities with the same loaded quality (Q) factor and length. In particular, even without mirror reflectors the DBE laser exhibits a lasing threshold which is an order of magnitude lower than that of a uniform cavity laser of the same length and with very high mirror reflectivity. Importantly, this novel DBE lasing regime enforces mode selectivity and coherent single-frequency operation even for pumping rates well beyond the lasing threshold, in contrast to the multifrequency nature of conventional uniform cavity lasers.

A leaky-wave antenna at optical frequencies is designed and integrated with a ring resonator at 1550 nm wavelength. The leaky wave is generated by using periodic perturbations in the integrated dielectric waveguide that excite the -1 spatial harmonic. The antenna consists of a dielectric waveguides with semiconductor corrugations, and it is compatible with CMOS fabrication technology. We show that integrating the leaky wave antenna in an optical ring resonator that is fed by directional couplers, we can improve the electronic control of the radiation through carrier injection into the semiconductor corrugations.

The possibility of integration of two important categories of optical components, i.e., circular polarizer and lens, into a thin plasmonic metasurface is examined, for the realistic case when metal losses cannot be neglected, for example when operating in the visible spectrum, or at infrared when non-noble metals are used. We introduce a metasurface made of nanoantennas that offer enough degrees of freedom to control both amplitude and phase of the reflection coefficient. First a theoretical formulation is developed and then an optimal design for a polarizing lens at mid-infrared wavelengths near 4.3 μmis presented.Atwo-dimensional array of Y-shaped nanoantennas with polarization-dependent and spatially varying phase response offers the possibility of balancing the losses experienced by the x- and y-polarized incident fields and is the basis for such a compact polarizing lens.

Engineering of the eigenmode dispersion of slow wave structures (SWSs) to achieve desired modal characteristics is an effective approach to enhance the performance of high-power traveling wave tube (TWT) amplifiers or oscillators. We investigate here for the first time a new synchronization regime in TWTs based on SWSs operating near a third-order degeneracy condition in their dispersion. This special three-eigenmode synchronization is associated with a stationary inflection point (SIP) that is manifested by the coalescence of three Floquet-Bloch eigenmodes in the SWS. We demonstrate the special features of 'cold' (without electron beam) periodic SWSs with SIP modeled as coupled transmission lines and investigate resonances of SWSs of finite length. We also show that by tuning parameters of a periodic SWS, one can achieve an SIP with nearly ideal flat dispersion relationship with zero group velocity or a slightly slanted one with a very small (positive or negative) group velocity leading to different operating schemes. The SIP structure when synchronized with an electron beam has potential benefits for amplification which include: 1) gain enhancement; 2) gain-bandwidth product improvement; and 3) higher power efficiency, when compared to conventional Pierce-like TWTs. The proposed theory paves the way for a new approach for potential improvements in gain, power efficiency, and gain-bandwidth product in high-power microwave amplifiers.

We propose a high-resolution microscopy technique for enantiospecific detection of chiral samples down to sub-100-nm size based on force measurement. We delve into the differential photoinduced optical force ΔF exerted on an achiral probe in the vicinity of a chiral sample when left and right circularly polarized beams separately excite the sample-probe interactive system. We analytically prove that ΔF is entangled with the enantiomer type of the sample enabling enantiospecific detection of chiral inclusions. Moreover, we demonstrate that ΔF is linearly dependent on both the chiral response of the sample and the electric response of the tip and is inversely related to the quartic power of probe-sample distance. We provide physical insight into the transfer of optical activity from the chiral sample to the achiral tip based on a rigorous analytical approach. We support our theoretical achievements by several numerical examples highlighting the potential application of the derived analytic properties. Lastly, we demonstrate the sensitivity of our method to enantiospecify nanoscale chiral samples with chirality parameter on the order of 0.01 and discuss how the sensitivity of our proposed technique can be further improved.

Thermally responsive polymers present an interesting avenue for tuning the optical properties of nanomaterials on their surfaces by varying their periodicity and shape using facile processing methods. Gold bowtie nanoantenna arrays are fabricated using nanosphere lithography on prestressed polyolefin (PO), a thermoplastic polymer, and optical properties are investigated via a combination of spectroscopy and electromagnetic simulations to correlate shape evolution with optical response. Geometric features of bowtie nanoantennas evolve by annealing at temperatures between 105 °C and 135 °C by releasing the degree of prestress in PO. Due to the higher modulus of Au versus PO, compressive stress occurs on Au bowtie regions on PO, which leads to surface buckling at the two highest annealing temperatures; regions with a 5 nm gap between bowtie nanoantennas are observed and the average reduction is 75%. Reflectance spectroscopy and full-wave electromagnetic simulations both demonstrate the ability to tune the plasmon resonance wavelength with a window of approximately 90 nm in the range of annealing temperatures investigated. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering measurements demonstrate that maximum enhancement is observed as the excitation wavelength approaches the plasmon resonance of Au bowtie nanoantennas. Both the size and morphology tunability offered by PO allows for customizing optical response.