Beam steering at the nanosecond time scale with an atomically thin reflector

Trond I Andersen; Ryan J Gelly; Giovanni Scuri; Bo L Dwyer; Dominik S Wild; Rivka Bekenstein; Andrey Sushko; Jiho Sung; You Zhou; Alexander A Zibrov; Xiaoling Liu; Andrew Y Joe; Kenji Watanabe; Takashi Taniguchi; Susanne F Yelin; Philip Kim; Hongkun Park; Mikhail D Lukin

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-29976-0

Beam steering at the nanosecond time scale with an atomically thin reflector

Nat Commun. 2022 Jun 14;13(1):3431. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29976-0.

Authors

Trond I Andersen¹, Ryan J Gelly¹, Giovanni Scuri¹, Bo L Dwyer¹, Dominik S Wild^{1

2}, Rivka Bekenstein^{1

3}, Andrey Sushko¹, Jiho Sung^{1

4}, You Zhou^{1

4

5}, Alexander A Zibrov¹, Xiaoling Liu¹, Andrew Y Joe¹, Kenji Watanabe⁶, Takashi Taniguchi⁷, Susanne F Yelin¹, Philip Kim^{1

8}, Hongkun Park^{9

10}, Mikhail D Lukin¹¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
² Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Hans-Kopfermann-Straße 1, D-85748, Garching, Germany.
³ ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
⁵ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.
⁶ Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, 305-0044, Japan.
⁷ International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, 305-0044, Japan.
⁸ John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
⁹ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA. hongkun_park@harvard.edu.
¹⁰ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA. hongkun_park@harvard.edu.
¹¹ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA. lukin@physics.harvard.edu.

Abstract

Techniques to mold the flow of light on subwavelength scales enable fundamentally new optical systems and device applications. The realization of programmable, active optical systems with fast, tunable components is among the outstanding challenges in the field. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a few-pixel beam steering device based on electrostatic gate control of excitons in an atomically thin semiconductor with strong light-matter interactions. By combining the high reflectivity of a MoSe₂ monolayer with a graphene split-gate geometry, we shape the wavefront phase profile to achieve continuously tunable beam deflection with a range of 10°, two-dimensional beam steering, and switching times down to 1.6 nanoseconds. Our approach opens the door for a new class of atomically thin optical systems, such as rapidly switchable beam arrays and quantum metasurfaces operating at their fundamental thickness limit.

Abstract

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