High Quality Factor Fano-Resonant All-Dielectric Metamaterials

Metasurface analogues of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) have been a major focus of the nanophotonics field over the past several years due their ability to produce high quality factor (Q-factor) resonances for applications such as low-loss slow light devices and highly sensitive optical sensors. However, Ohmic loss limits the achievable Q-factors in conventional plasmonic EIT metasurfaces to values less than 10, significantly hampering device performance. Here, we report experimental demonstration of a classical analogue of EIT using all-dielectric silicon-based metasurfaces. Due to extremely low absorption loss and coherent interaction of neighboring meta-atoms, a record-high Q-factor of 483 is experimentally observed, leading to a refractive index sensor with a figure-of-merit (FOM) of 103. Furthermore, we show that the dielectric metasurfaces can be engineered to confine the optical field in either the silicon resonator or the environment, allowing one to tailor light-matter interaction at the nanoscale.