Many-Body Subradiant Excitations in Metamaterial Arrays: Experiment and Theory

Subradiant excitations, originally predicted by Dicke, have posed a long-standing challenge in physics owing to their weak radiative coupling to environment. Here we engineer massive coherently driven classical subradiance in planar metamaterial arrays as a spatially extended eigenmode comprising ov...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jenkins, Stewart D., Ruostekoski, Janne, Papasimakis, Nikitas, Savo, Salvatore, Zheludev, Nikolay I.
Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85112
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/43647
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Subradiant excitations, originally predicted by Dicke, have posed a long-standing challenge in physics owing to their weak radiative coupling to environment. Here we engineer massive coherently driven classical subradiance in planar metamaterial arrays as a spatially extended eigenmode comprising over 1000 metamolecules. By comparing the near- and far-field response in large-scale numerical simulations with those in experimental observations we identify strong evidence for classically correlated multimetamolecule subradiant states that dominate the total excitation energy. We show that similar spatially extended many-body subradiance can also exist in plasmonic metamaterial arrays at optical frequencies.