Transforming two-dimensional guided light using nonmagnetic metamaterial waveguides

Journal article, 2016

Almost a decade ago, transformation optics established a geometrical perspective to describe the interaction of light with structured matter, enhancing our understanding and control of light. However, despite their huge technological relevance in applications such as optical circuitry, optical detection, and actuation, guided electromagnetic waves along dielectric waveguides have not yet benefited from the flexibility and conceptual simplicity of transformation optics. Indeed, transformation optics inherently imposes metamaterials not only inside the waveguide's core but also in the surrounding substrate and cladding. Here we restore the two-dimensional nature of guided electromagnetic waves by introducing a thickness variation on an anisotropic dielectric core according to alternative two-dimensional equivalence relations. Our waveguides require metamaterials only inside the core with the additional advantage that the metamaterials need not be magnetic and, hence, our purely dielectric waveguides are low loss. We verify the versatility of our theory with full wave simulations of three crucial functionalities: beam bending, beam splitting, and lensing. Our method opens up the toolbox of transformation optics to a plethora of waveguide-based devices.