Abstract:

Experiments on ultrathin anisotropic arrays of subwavelength optical antennas display out-of-plane refraction. A powerful three-dimensional (3D) extension of the recently demonstrated generalized laws of refraction and reflection shows that the interface imparts a tangential wavevector to the incident light leading to anomalous beams, which in general are noncoplanar with the incident beam. The refracted beam direction can be controlled by varying the angle between the plane of incidence and the antenna array.