Generalized Coherent Wave Control at Dynamic Interfaces

Abstract

Coherent wave control is of key importance across a broad range of fields such as electromagnetics, photonics, and acoustics. It enables us to amplify or suppress the outgoing waves via engineering amplitudes and phases of multiple incidences. However, within a purely spatially (temporally) engineered medium, coherent wave control requires the frequency of the associated incidences to be identical (opposite). In this work, this conventional constraint is broken by generalizing coherent wave control into a spatiotemporally engineered medium is broken, i.e., the system featuring a dynamic interface. Owing to the broken translational symmetry in space and time, both the subluminal and superluminal interfaces allow interference between scattered waves regardless of their different frequencies and wavevectors. Hence, one can flexibly eliminate the backward- or forward-propagating waves scattered from the dynamic interfaces by controlling the incident amplitudes and phases. The work not only presents a generalized way for reshaping arbitrary waveforms but also provides a promising paradigm to generate ultrafast pulses using low-frequency signals. It has also implemented suppression of forward-propagating waves in microstrip transmission lines with fast photodiode switches.