Giant transmitted Goos-Hänchen amplification via high-Q resonant tunneling for angle-interrogation refractometry

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Materials Science

Background:

• The Goos-Hänchen (GH) effect describes the lateral displacement of a reflected or transmitted light beam at an interface.
• Enhancing GH shifts typically involves complex optical structures or low throughput, limiting practical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To engineer a prism-coupled multilayer platform for achieving giant transmitted Goos-Hänchen displacements.
• To develop a high-throughput optical platform for enhanced beam displacement and sensitive refractometric sensing.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of an inorganic dielectric multilayer stack with Bragg mirrors and symmetric phase-matching layers.
• Engineering a high-Q resonant-tunnelling state within an impedance-matched tunnelling channel.
• Utilizing the steep transmission-phase dispersion at the tunnelling resonance for beam-shift amplification.

Main Results:

• Achieved near-unity optical throughput combined with giant transmitted GH displacements (on the order of 10^4 µm).
• Demonstrated ultranarrow angular transmission windows with abrupt phase excursions.
• Adapted the platform for refractometric sensing with a sensitivity of 53.8 deg per refractive index unit (RIU).

Conclusions:

• Resonant tunnelling in dielectric multilayers provides a high-throughput method for beam-shift amplification.
• The developed platform is suitable for compact, high-contrast angle-interrogation refractometry.