Near-Zero-Index Slabs on Bloch Surface Wave Platform for Long-Range Directional Couplers and Optical Logic Gates

Near-zero-index materials and structures, with their extraordinary optical behaviors of phase-free propagation resulting in directional radiation, provide a possible approach for directional coupling and optical logic gates in photonic integrated circuits. However, the radiation from the near-zero-index structures is limited to a short range of a few hundreds of nanometers. A Bloch surface wave (BSW), an electromagnetic surface wave that can be excited at the interface between an all-dielectric multilayer and a dielectric medium with a low-loss optical mode, provides a solution to increase the propagation length. In this work, we present a nanostructured near-zero-index slab integrated on the all-dielectric metal-free BSW platform for long-range surface wave radiation. By employing the long-range directional surface-wave radiation, a directional coupler and optical logic gates based on the BSW near-zero-index slabs are realized. The proposed directional couplers achieve long coupling distances (the electric-field magnitude ratio between the input slab and output slab is 0.22 with a 50 μm coupling distance), which is 2 orders of magnitude longer than that of conventional directional couplers based on evanescent wave coupling. By controlling the interference pattern of the BSW between the slabs, the XOR logic gate is experimentally demonstrated with a significant extinction ratio of 27.9 dB at telecommunications wavelengths. The BSW near-zero-index logic gates and the directional coupler with long-range light propagation provide an approach to the development of photonic integrated circuits and metal-free surface wave-based applications.