We will demonstrate that the incorporation of active media with extremely small gain coefficients inside epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) plasmonic waveguides will cause the formation of exceptional points and spectral singularities (light amplification). Note that the realization of these points with symmetric reciprocal plasmonic configurations is still elusive mainly due to the weak light-matter interaction at the nanoscale. These intriguing effects will lead to several novel functionalities, such as reflectionless ENZ response, slow light, and nanolasing. Moreover, we will demonstrate that the entanglement of two or multiple emitters placed inside the ENZ nanochannels, even without incorporating gain (lossy ENZ case), will be enhanced over extended areas, which are comparable or even longer than the wavelength of the emitted radiation. Our findings can be applied to improve the response of optical quantum computers, such as the efficient control of long distance entanglement between qubits.
We demonstrate a way to coherently control light at the nanoscale and achieve coherent perfect absorption (CPA) by using epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) plasmonic waveguides. The presented waveguides support an effective ENZ response at their cut-off frequency, combined with strong and homogeneous field enhancement along their nanochannels. The CPA conditions are perfectly satisfied at the ENZ frequency, surprisingly by a subwavelength plasmonic structure, resulting in strong CPA under the illumination of two counter-propagating plane waves with appropriate amplitudes and phases. In addition, we investigate the nonlinear response of the proposed ENZ plasmonic configuration as we increase the input intensity of the incident waves. We demonstrate that the CPA phenomenon can become both intensity- and phasedependent in this case leading to new tunable all-optical switching and absorption devices.
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