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Broadband mid-infrared non-reciprocal absorption using magnetized gradient epsilon-near-zero thin films

Nature Materials volume 22, pages 1196–1202 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The study of magneto-optical absorption has stimulated diverse energy-technology-related explorations, showing potential in breaking the current theoretical efficiency limits of energy devices compared with reciprocal counterparts. However, experimentally realizing strong infrared non-reciprocal absorption remains an open challenge, and existing proposals of non-reciprocal absorbers are restricted to a narrow working waveband. Here we observe highly asymmetric absorption spectra over a broad mid-infrared band (nearly 10 μm) using doped InAs multilayers with gradient epsilon-near-zero frequencies. We reveal that the magnetized epsilon-near-zero behaviours and material loss play important roles in achieving strongly non-reciprocal absorption under a moderate external magnetic field using a thin epsilon-near-zero film (<λ/40, λ is the wavelength). Our approach enables flexible control over the working frequencies and non-reciprocal bandwidths by designing magnetized InAs films with different doping concentrations. The proposed principles can also be generalized to other III–V semiconductors, magnetized metals, topological Weyl semimetals, magnetized zero-index metamaterials and metasurfaces.

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Fig. 1: Schematics of non-reciprocal absorption control.
Fig. 2: Non-reciprocal absorption induced by asymmetric BMs.
Fig. 3: Dual-band non-reciprocal absorbers.
Fig. 4: Broadband non-reciprocal absorbers.

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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

C.Y.Z. acknowledges the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 52120105009) and the Shanghai Key Fundamental Research Grant (no. 20JC1414800). C.-W.Q. acknowledges financial support from the NRF, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore, under the Competitive Research Program Award (NRF-CRP26-2021-0063). M.Q.L. acknowledges support from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (nos. BX20220200 and 2023M732199) and the SJTU-NUS Joint PhD Project. L.B., S.X. and J.Q. acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (no. 2021YFB2801600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 51972044, 52021001, 52102357 and U22A20148), Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Department (nos. 2019YFH0154, 2020ZYD015, 2021YFSY0016 and 99203070) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. ZYGX2020J005). H.L. acknowledges the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 62022084 and 62235019), Chinese Academy of Sciences (nos. ZDBS-LY-JSC009, YJKYYQ20200032 and YSBR-069) and Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (no. 20XD1424700). We also acknowledge the analysis support from the Instrumental Analysis Center of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Mengqi Liu, Shuang Xia, Wenjian Wan.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, MOE Key Laboratory for Power Machinery and Engineering, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Mengqi Liu & Changying Zhao

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

    Mengqi Liu & Cheng-Wei Qiu

  3. National Engineering Research Center of Electromagnetic Radiation Control Materials, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Shuang Xia, Jun Qin & Lei Bi

  4. State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Shuang Xia, Jun Qin & Lei Bi

  5. Key Laboratory of Terahertz Solid State Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Wenjian Wan & Hua Li

  6. Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China

    Hua Li

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Contributions

M.Q.L., C.Y.Z. and C.-W.Q. conceived the ideas. M.Q.L. performed the simulations and advised about the experimental design. L.B. and H.L. led the experiments. W.J.W. fabricated the samples. M.Q.L. performed the optical characteristic measurements. S.X. performed the optical measurements. M.Q.L., S.X., J.Q., H.L., L.B. and C.-W.Q. analysed the data and all the authors discussed the results. M.Q.L. wrote the paper with inputs and comments from all authors. H.L., L.B., C.Y.Z. and C.-W.Q. supervised the project.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hua Li, Changying Zhao, Lei Bi or Cheng-Wei Qiu.

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Liu, M., Xia, S., Wan, W. et al. Broadband mid-infrared non-reciprocal absorption using magnetized gradient epsilon-near-zero thin films. Nat. Mater. 22, 1196–1202 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01635-9

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