Ultrastrong extraordinary transmission and reflection in PT-symmetric Thue-Morse optical waveguide networks

In this paper, we construct a 1D PT-symmetric Thue-Morse aperiodic optical waveguide network (PTSTMAOWN) and mainly investigate the ultrastrong extraordinary transmission and reflection. We propose an approach to study the photonic modes and solve the problem of calculating photonic modes distributions in aperiodic networks due to the lack of dispersion functions and find that in a PTSTMAOWN there exist more photonic modes and more spontaneous PT-symmetric breaking points, which are quite different from other reported PT-symmetric optical systems. Additionally, we develop a method to sort spontaneous PT-symmetric breaking point zones to seek the strongest extraordinary point and obtain that at this point the strongest extraordinary transmission and reflection arrive at 2.96316 x 105 and 1.32761 x 105, respectively, due to the PT-symmetric coupling resonance and the special symmetry pattern of TM networks. These enormous gains are several orders of magnitude larger than the previous results. This optical system may possess potential in designing optical amplifier, optical logic elements in photon computers and ultrasensitive optical switches with ultrahigh monochromatity. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America