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Tamm states: Optical surface states in magnetophotonic crystals

Magnetophotonic crystals are artificial media that provide efficient coupling of light to their magnetic constituents. Light confinement inside magnetophotonic crystals results in a large enhancement of their magneto-optical response, which is a promising property for optical applications such as isolators, circulators and modulators.

Here, using state of the art microfabrication technology to create periodic structures with high accuracy, Alexander Baryshev and colleagues at Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS) report the existence of so-called optical surface (Tamm) states at the interfaces of magnetophotonic crystals.

Structures with different designs were fabricated by sputtering where the periodicity of magnetophotonic crystals was terminated by another medium: a material with a negative permittivity or a photonic crystal.

The researchers demonstrated that the tailoring interfaces of magnetophotonic crystals can produce conditions for the existence of Tamm states, where the manifestation of the states was seen as resonant peaks in transmission and Faraday rotation spectra of the crystals (Fig.1).

This novel media shows potential for magnetotunable filters and localizing light within any active material used as the constituent layers of photonic structures.

Reference:
Taichi Goto1, Alexander Baryshev1,2, Mitsuteru Inoue1, Alexander Dorofeenko3, Alexander Merzlikin3, Alexei Vinogradov3, Alexander Lisyansky4, Alexander Granovsky5
Tailoring surfaces of one-dimensional magnetophotonic crystals: Optical Tamm state and Faraday rotation
Physical Review B 79, 125103 (2009)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.79.125103

1Toyohashi University of Technology, Aichi, Japan; 2Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St.Petersburg, Russia; 3Institute for Theoretical and Applied Electromagnetics, Moscow, Russia; 4Department of Physics, Queens College of the City University of New York, USA; 5Moscow State University, Russia

Further information
Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS):
http://www.eiiris.tut.ac.jp/
Inoue Group at Toyohashi University of Technology:
http://www.maglab.eee.tut.ac.jp/eng-index.html


Dr Baryshev


Enlarge Image
Fig.1. (a) SEM image of a magnetophotonic crystal, the system of two adjoining multilayers. (b) Sketch of the spatial distribution of dielectric constants and the in-sample distribution of the electric field amplitude for the resonant wavelength. (c), (d) Experimental (circles) and calculated (gray solid line) spectra of the magnetophotonic crystal. Faraday rotation of the garnet/SiO2 multilayer, the reference sample, is shown by black solid line in plot (d).

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