Photon Acceleration Using a Time-Varying Epsilon-near-Zero Metasurface

Abstract

A light beam’s frequency can blueshift when the beam travels through a medium that exhibits a time-dependent decrease in the refractive index. Here we show that a metasurface made of a plasmonic antenna array on a thin indium tin oxide (ITO), which exhibits epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) response, can behave as a time-varying medium and change the frequency of a sufficiently strong light beam through self-action effect. Specifically, we observe that a near-resonant optical excitation of the 92 nm thick metasurface leads to an intensity-dependent blueshift of the excitation pulse. We measured a maximum blueshift of ∼1.6 THz with ∼4 GW/cm2 incident intensity. The observed effect using an ITO-based ENZ metasurface has an energy requirement that is up to 200× lower than implementations using ITO alone.