Nonreciprocal Optical Tunnelling Through Evanescently Coupled Tamm States in Magnetophotonic Crystals

Abstract

Abstract Evanescently coupled Tamm states are achieved through two magnetophotonic crystals (MPCs) with a pair of coupling prisms. At the wavelengths of coupled Tamm states, a double of nonreciprocal optical tunnelling channels is found through the transmission spectra obtained from a developed transfer matrix method. The nonreciprocal tunnelling wavelength and the interval between two nonreciprocal channels can be adjusted depending on the width of the air gap between two MPCs or the scale invariant of a PC. The nonreciprocal tunnelling is demonstrated through electromagnetic field distribution simulations based on finite element software. Such theoretical results may provide a new method to design tunable optical isolators with a double of channels.