Evanescent wave induced polarization-insensitive self-organization of stratified single-negative materials

Optical fields can induce optical forces between macroscopic objects, giving rise to different structures. Through rigorous calculation, we show that a collection of single negative slabs which possesses either negative permittivity or negative permeability (i.e. ε < 0, μ > 0 or ε > 0, μ < 0) in water can be self-organized into one-dimensional photonic crystals, due to the coupling of propagating wave and evanescent wave. We further demonstrated that the optical binding is irrespective of the polarization and angle of the incident plane wave. We call such a phenomenon—polarization-insensitive optical binding. We also demonstrate that polarization-insensitive optical binding can be achieved on microscale and millimeter scale. Polarization and angle insensitive band edge is the key to achieve polarization and angle insensitive optical binding. This work provides a new strategy to tailor the photonic crystals containing single negative materials towards the development of fine-tuning optical devices. (paper)