Slow wave and truly rainbow trapping in a one-way terahertz waveguide

Abstract

Slowing down or even trapping electromagnetic (EM) waves attract researchers’ attention for its potential applications in energy storage, optical signal processing and nonlinearity enhancement. However, conventional trapping, in fact, is not truly trapping because of the existence of strong coupling effects and reflections. In this paper, a novel metal-semiconductor-semiconductor-metal (MSSM) heterostructure is presented, and novel truly rainbow trapping of terahertz waves is demonstrated based on a tapered MSSM structure. More importantly, functional devices such as optical buffer, optical switch and optical filter are achieved in one single structure based on the truly rainbow trapping theory. Owing to the property of one-way propagation, these new types of optical devices can be high performance and are expected to be used in integrated optical circuits.