Photonic crystal carpet: Manipulating wave fronts in the near field at 1.55 μm

International audienceGround-plane cloaks, which transform a curved mirror into a flat one, and recently reported at wavelengths ranging from the optical to the visible spectrum, bring the realm of optical illusion a step closer to reality. However, all carpet-cloaking experiments have thus far been carried out in the far field. Here, we demonstrate numerically and experimentally that a dielectric photonic crystal (PC) of an irregular shape made of a honeycomb array of air holes can scatter waves in the near field like a PC with a flat boundary at stop band frequencies. This mirage effect relies upon a specific arrangement of dielectric pillars placed at the nodes of a quasiconformal grid dressing the PC. Our carpet is experimentally shown to flatten the scattered wave fronts of a PC with a bump throughout the range of wavelengths from 1520 to 1580 nm within the stop band extending from 1280 to 1940 nm. The device has been fabricated using a single-mask advanced nanoelectronics technique on III-V semiconductors and the near field measurements have been carried out in order to image the wave fronts’ curvatures around the telecommunication wavelength 1550 nm. Interestingly, comparisons of our near-field experimental results with full-wave simulations suggest the relatively low aspect ratio of the fabricated carpet (pillars have 200 nm diameter and 2 μm height) makes it inherently three dimensional. Moreover, this carpet is constrained to normal incidence. We therefore propose an elaborated design of the carpet (with pillars of varying radii) which should work at different angles of incidence