Complete power concentration into a single waveguide in large-scale waveguide array lenses

Waveguide array lenses are waveguide arrays that focus light incident on all waveguides at the input side into a small number of waveguides at the output side. Ideal waveguide array lenses provide complete (100%) power concentration of incident light into a single waveguide. While of great interest for several applications, ideal waveguide array lenses have not been demonstrated for practical arrays with large numbers of waveguides. The only waveguide arrays that have sufficient degrees of freedom to allow for the design of an ideal waveguide array lens are those where both the propagation constants of the individual waveguides and the coupling constants between the waveguides vary as a function of space. Here, we use state-of-the-art numerical methods to demonstrate complete power transfer into a single waveguide for waveguide array lenses with large numbers of waveguides. We verify this capability for more than a thousand waveguides using a spatial coupled mode theory. We hereby extend the state-of-art by more than two orders of magnitude. We also demonstrate for the first time a physical design for an ideal waveguide array lens. The design is based on an aperiodic metallic waveguide array and focuses ~100% of the incident light into a deep-subwavelength focal spot.