Negative Refraction

A new mechanism for negative refraction and focusing using selective diffraction from surface corrugation
W. T. Lu, Y. J. Huang, P. Vodo, R. K. Banyal, C. H. Perry, and S. Sridhar
Department of Physics and Electronic Materials Research Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 w.lu@neu.edu, s.sridhar@neu.edu

Abstract: Refraction at a smooth interface is accompanied bymomentum transfer normal to the interface. We show that corrugating an initially smooth, totally reflecting, non-metallic interface provides a momentum kick parallel to the surface, which can be used to refract light negatively or positively. This new mechanism of negative refraction is demonstrated by visible light and microwave experiments on grisms (grating-prisms). Single-beamall-angle-negative-refraction is achieved by incorporating a surface grating on a flat multilayered material. This negative refraction mechanism is used to create a new optical device, a grating lens. A planoconcave grating lens is demonstrated to focus plane microwaves to a point image. These results show that customized surface engineering can be used to achieve negative refraction even though the bulk materialhas positive refractive index. The surface periodicity provides a tunable parameter to control beam propagation leading to novel optical and microwave devices.
© 2007 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (160.4670) Materials: Optical materials; (050.1950) Diffraction and gratings: diffraction grating; (110.2990) Imaging systems: imaging formation theory

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#82159 - $15.00 USD

Received 17 Apr 2007; revised 22 Jun 2007; accepted 6 Jul 2007; published 11 Jul 2007

(C) 2007 OSA

23 July 2007 / Vol. 15, No. 15 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9166

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