Broadband enhancement of Faraday effect using magnetoplasmonic metasurfaces

Abstract

Magnetooptical Faraday effect enables ultrafast photonic devices based on nonreciprocal polarization rotation; however, the intrinsic weakness of Faraday effect prevents miniaturization and practical applications of nonreciprocal photonic devices. Magnetoplasmonics offers new mechanisms for enhancing magnetooptical effects using surface plasmon resonances, which generally have narrow bandwidths. Using finite-difference time-domain modeling, we demonstrate a magnetoplasmonic metasurface, which remarkably enhances the Faraday effect in a wide spectral range. While Faraday rotation in a bare bismuth-substituted yttrium iron garnet film is below 0.02 degrees in the studied range of 600-1600 nm, the proposed metasurface yields few degrees of rotation in a broad band with a maximum exceeding 6.5 degrees, which indicates about three orders of magnitude enhancement. We also show that by optimizing the configuration of the system including the geometry and excitation parameters, the metasurface response and operation band can be tuned further, and rotation values higher than 20 degrees can be achieved. Finally, we present guidelines for designing magnetoplasmonic metasurfaces.