UTA Photonics Center Distinguished Speaker Series

We discuss some of our recent efforts in control light in wavevector and frequency spaces. We show that nonlocal metasurfaces can be designed to achieve specific variations of transmission or reflection coefficients of light as a function of wavevectors. And as results, one can achieve the compression of free space, and the creation of light bullets, a form of electromagnetic pulse that can propagate in free space at any group velocities without dispersion or diffraction effect. We also show that the introduction of time-modulated system allows us to treat the frequency of light as a synthetic dimension. Non-trivial topological physics effects can then be created with the control of the modulation format. As examples we experimentally demonstrate effective magnetic field and non-Abelian gauge fields for photons.