Twist-Induced Beam Steering and Blazing Effects in Photonic Crystal Devices

Nicolas Roy; Beicheng Lou; Shanhui Fan; Alexandre Mayer; Michaël Lobet

doi:10.1038/s41377-025-01942-7

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Twist-Induced Beam Steering and Blazing Effects in Photonic Crystal Devices

Original Articles

- Twist-Induced Beam Steering and Blazing Effects in Photonic Crystal Devices
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 14, Issue 9, Pages: 2799-2808(2025)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Namur Institute for Complex Systems, University of Namur, Namur 5000, Belgium
  2.Namur Institute for Structured Matter, University of Namur, Namur 5000, Belgium
  3.Department of Applied Physics and Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
  4.John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 9 Oxford Street, MA-02138 Cambridge, USA
- Author bio：
  
  Nicolas Roy (nicolas.roy@unamur.be)
  Michaël Lobet (michael.lobet@unamur.be)
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/s41377-025-01942-7
  CLC：
- Received：09 January 2025，
  
  Revised：2025-06-24，
  
  Accepted：27 June 2025，
  
  Published Online：07 August 2025，
  
  Published：30 September 2025
- Accepted：
Scan QR Code
Roy, N. et al. Twist-Induced Beam Steering and Blazing Effects in Photonic Crystal Devices. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 2799-2808 (2025).
DOI：

Roy, N. et al. Twist-Induced Beam Steering and Blazing Effects in Photonic Crystal Devices. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 2799-2808 (2025). DOI： 10.1038/s41377-025-01942-7.

摘要

Abstract

Twisted bilayer photonic crystals introduce a twist between two stacked photonic crystal slabs

enabling strong modulation of their electromagnetic properties. The change in the twist angle strongly influences the resonant frequencies and available propagating diffraction orders with applications including sensing

lasing

slow light or wavefront engineering. In this work

we design and analyze twisted bilayer crystals capable of steering light in a direction controlled by the twist angle. To achieve beam steering

the device efficiently routes input power into a single

twist-dependent

transmitted diffraction order. The outgoing light then follows the orientation of this diffraction order

externally controlled by the twist angle. Our study shows

using systematic exploration of the design space

how the device resembles blazed gratings by effectively canceling the undesired diffraction orders. The optimized devices exhibit a shared slant dependent on the selected diffraction order and that proves robust to the twist angle. Our analysis is supported by a classical blazing model and a data-oriented statistical analysis. The data-oriented approach is steered by high-efficiency heuristic optimization method

which enabled the design of optimized devices demonstrating an efficiency above 90% across twist angles ranging from 0 to 30° for both TE and TM polarizations. Extending the optimization to include left- and right-handed polarizations yields overall accuracy nearing 90% when averaged across the entire 0 to 60° control range. Finally

with the identification of the blazing effect in this initially black box structure

we show one can consider simpler design for a first prototype.

关键词

Keywords

references

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