Subdiffractive confinement of ultrashort mid-IR pulses with photonic funnels

The ability to control the spatial distribution of light, particularly in deep sub-wavelength areas, is important for a range of materials science, microscopy, and communications applications. Separately, materials science and communications rely on the ability to temporally shape the evolution of electromagnetic pulses. In this work, we investigate theoretically the propagation of ultrafast pulses inside hyperbolic metamaterials-based photonic funnels, which have been recently used to achieve a deep subwavelength (wavelength/30) concentration of monochromatic mid-infrared light. By analyzing the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of the pulse-funnel interaction, we show that photonic funnels, in general, broaden bandwidth-limited ultrafast Gaussian pulses. We demonstrate that this broadening can be mitigated by pre-chirping the incoming light, realizing simultaneous intensity enhancement and spatio-temporal compression of mid-wave IR light in the all-semiconductor "designer metal" funnel platform. Our analysis suggests that, in combination with linear chirp, designer-metal-based photonic funnels can be utilized with 100 fs bandwidth- and diffraction-limited pulses to produce wavelength/30-scale signals of ∼200 fs duration, with intensity enhancement on the order of 5. Lowering material absorption can further enhance the peak intensity. The results presented can be used to assess the perspectives of ultrafast sub-diffraction light manipulation in other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum by adjusting the (meta)material composition of the funnels.