Analogue computing with metamaterials

Despite their widespread use for performing advanced computational tasks, digital signal processors suffer from several restrictions, including low speed, high power consumption and complexity, caused by costly analogue-to-digital converters. For this reason, there has recently been a surge of interest in performing wave-based analogue computations that avoid analogue-to-digital conversion and allow massively parallel operation. In particular, novel schemes for wave-based analogue computing have been proposed based on artificially engineered photonic structures, that is, metamaterials. Such kinds of computing systems, referred to as computational metamaterials, can be as fast as the speed of light and as small as its wavelength, yet, impart complex mathematical operations on an incoming wave packet or even provide solutions to integro-differential equations. These much-sought features promise to enable a new generation of ultra-fast, compact and efficient processing and computing hardware based on light-wave propagation. In this Review, we discuss recent advances in the field of computational metamaterials, surveying the state-of-the-art metastructures proposed to perform analogue computation. We further describe some of the most exciting applications suggested for these computing systems, including image processing, edge detection, equation solving and machine learning. Finally, we provide an outlook for the possible directions and the key problems for future research.

Chiral Metamaterials for a Robust Waveguiding Scheme

Romain Christophe Rémy Fleury, Nadège Sihame Kaïna, Bakhtiyar Orazbayev

Recent advances in the field of metamaterials have shown that waves can be efficiently manipulated at the subwavelength scale through the interactions with an ensemble of resonant inclusions, opening new horizons in overcoming the size limits of devices which are often tied to the wavelength of operation [1]. Such size limit is crucial for many applications where the overall dimensions are required to be as small as possible, for instance cost-eﬃcient devices for satellite communications. Unfortunately, the resonant inclusions of these artificial media result in a large sensitivity of the propagation to geometrical imperfections and disorder-induced backscattering, reducing their performance. More recently, it has been demonstrated that the topological concepts which originated in solid-state physics can be transferred to not only to photonic crystals [3,4], which still scale with the operating wavelength, but also to locally-resonant crystalline metamaterials, which can have a deeply subwavelength structure [5]. However, since the topological properties in such time-reversal invariant designs heavily rely on the lattice structure of the media and frequency dispersion of the metamaterial, they are inevitably sensitive to any disruption of the lattice symmetries that can couple time-reversed modes. Moreover, since most of disorders (in the location or in resonance frequency of the resonant inclusions) will most likely break the lattice symmetry and disrupt the wave propagation, these time-reversal invariant topological designs are also in principle sensitive to defects. In this talk, we will show that a chiral metamaterial [6,7] can be exploited to create a robust-to-disorder subwavelength waveguide and we will demonstrate this possibility experimentally in the microwave regime. Moreover, we will quantitatively demonstrate the superior robustness of the proposed design to both spatial or frequency disorders by performing ensemble averages on disorder realizations along the path of the guided wave, and comparing them with previously proposed subwavelength waveguide designs: frequency defect lines, symmetry-based topological edge modes and valley interface states. [1] J. D. Joannopoulos, S. G. Johnson, J. N. Winn, and R. D. Meade, Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008), 2nd ed. [2] N. Kaina, F. Lemoult, M. Fink, and G. Lerosey, Negative Refractive Index and Acoustic Superlens from Multiple Scattering in Single Negative Metamaterials, Nature, 525, 77 (2015). [3] S. Raghu and F. D. M. Haldane, Analogs of Quantum-Hall-Effect Edge States in Photonic Crystals, Phys. Rev. A - At. Mol. Opt. Phys., 78, 1 (2008). [4] Z. Wang, Y. Chong, J. D. Joannopoulos, and M. Soljacić, Observation of Unidirectional Backscattering-Immune Topological Electromagnetic States., Nature, 461, 772 (2009). [5] S. Yves, R. Fleury, T. Berthelot, M. Fink, F. Lemoult, and G. Lerosey, Crystalline Metamaterials for Topological Properties at Subwavelength Scales, Nat. Commun., 8, 16023 (2017). [6] M. Goryachev and M. E. Tobar, Reconfigurable Microwave Photonic Topological Insulator, Phys. Rev. Appl., 6, 1 (2016). [7] J. E. Vázquez-Lozano and A. Martínez, Optical Chirality in Dispersive and Lossy Media, Phys. Rev. Lett., 121, 43901 (2018).

2019

Chiral Metamaterials for a Robust Waveguiding Scheme

Romain Christophe Rémy Fleury, Nadège Sihame Kaïna, Bakhtiyar Orazbayev

2019