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Engineered disorder in photonics

Nature Reviews Materials volume 6, pages 226–243 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Disorder, which qualitatively describes some measure of irregularities in spatial patterns, is ubiquitous in many-body systems, equilibrium and non-equilibrium states of matter, network structures, biological systems and wave–matter interactions. In photonics, the introduction of order and disorder for device applications has traditionally been treated separately. However, recent developments in nanofabrication and design strategies have enabled the use of materials that lie between the extremes of order and disorder that can yield innovative optical phenomena owing to their engineered disordered patterns. Here, we review recent achievements in the emerging field of engineered disorder in photonics by outlining milestones in the control of the spectrum, transport, wavefront and topology of light in disordered structures. We show that engineered disorder has begun to transform the traditional landscape of photonics by introducing a greatly enhanced design freedom and, hence, has great potential for the rational design of the next generation of materials.

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Fig. 1: Landscape of order and disorder.
Fig. 2: Engineering disorder by designing nontrivial loci between order and uncorrelated disorder.
Fig. 3: Engineered spectral responses in deformed microcavities.
Fig. 4: Engineered spectral responses in hyperuniform structures.
Fig. 5: Engineered spectral responses using isospectrality.
Fig. 6: Controlled localization and transport in engineered disordered systems.
Fig. 7: Shaped wavefront and controlled directivity obtained with engineered disorder.
Fig. 8: Topological phenomena engineered by structural disorder.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank M. Klatt, J. Kim, T. Middlemas and C. Maher for their helpful suggestions on the manuscript. S. Yu and N. Park acknowledge financial support from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) through the Global Frontier Program (2014M3A6B3063708). S. Yu was also supported by the Basic Science Research Program (2016R1A6A3A04009723). C.-W.Q. acknowledges financial support from the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Competitive Research Program (CRP award NRF-CRP15-2015-03). S. Torquato was supported by the Princeton University Innovation Fund for New Ideas in the Natural Sciences.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Sunkyu Yu, Cheng-Wei Qiu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Photonic Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Sunkyu Yu & Namkyoo Park

  2. Intelligent Wave Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Sunkyu Yu

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Cheng-Wei Qiu

  4. Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yidong Chong

  5. Department of Chemistry, Department of Physics, Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Salvatore Torquato

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Yu, S., Qiu, CW., Chong, Y. et al. Engineered disorder in photonics. Nat Rev Mater 6, 226–243 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-020-00263-y

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