Beam steering at the nanosecond time scale with an atomically thin reflector
Abstract
Techniques to mold the flow of light on subwavelength scales enable fundamentally new optical systems and device applications. The realization of programmable, active optical systems with fast, tunable components is among the outstanding challenges in the field. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a few-pixel beam steering device based on electrostatic gate control of excitons in an atomically thin semiconductor with strong light-matter interactions. By combining the high reflectivity of a MoSe2 monolayer with a graphene split-gate geometry, we shape the wavefront phase profile to achieve continuously tunable beam deflection with a range of 10, two-dimensional beam steering, and switching times down to 1.6 nanoseconds. Our approach opens the door for a new class of atomically thin optical systems, such as rapidly switchable beam arrays and quantum metasurfaces operating at their fundamental thickness limit.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2111.04781,
title = {Beam steering at the nanosecond time scale with an atomically thin reflector},
author = {Trond I. Andersen and Ryan J. Gelly and Giovanni Scuri and Bo L. Dwyer and Dominik S. Wild and Rivka Bekenstein and Andrey Sushko and Jiho Sung and You Zhou and Alexander A. Zibrov and Xiaoling Liu and Andrew Y. Joe and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Susanne F. Yelin and Philip Kim and Hongkun Park and Mikhail D. Lukin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.04781},
year = {2023}
}