Defect in Photonic Time Crystals

Abstract

Photonic Time Crystals (PTCs) provide a completely new platform exhibiting light wave amplification owing to periodically varying electromagnetic properties. The need to control this amplification is becoming increasingly important, especially with the emergence of meta surface based practical realization of PTCs. The work introduces isolated temporal defect in PTCs to establish a new degree of control over the amplification. We find that in presence of the defect, the transmittance and reflectance become close to unity for a specific value of momentum (k_d) within the bandgaps accompanied by a significant impact on the amount of amplification. We show the impact of the temporal defect on the exponential growth of intensity with PTC periods. The effect primarily depends on the Floquet frequency of the PTC that becomes real at k_d giving rise to four pulses instead of two as an outcome of gap propagation. We further demonstrate that by manipulating the temporal and dielectric properties of the defect, the defect state in momentum can be tuned to serve the design interest for specialty applications.