Shadi Safaei Jazi

The nonreciprocal magnetoelectric effect in Tellegen materials enables exotic phenomena such as axion-modified electrodynamics and fosters the development of magnet-free nonreciprocal media. As the nonreciprocal counterpart to the well-known chiral electromagnetic response, it offers a parallel framework in which many concepts developed for chiral materials can be translated to Tellegen media, potentially unlocking new avenues for fundamental studies and applications. Although predicted over 75 years ago and observed in only a handful of natural materials with very low strength, the strong optical Tellegen effect has remained experimentally elusive. Here, we report the first experimental demonstration of a resonant optical diagonal Tellegen effect in a metasurface, showcasing a response that is 100 times greater than that of any known natural material. This optical metasurface, consisting of randomly distributed cobalt-silicon nanoscatterers with strong shape anisotropy, utilizes spontaneous magnetization to achieve a robust Tellegen effect without the need for an external magnetic field. In addition to the Tellegen response, the metasurface exhibits both gyroelectric and gyromagnetic effects, contributing to nonreciprocal cross-polarized light reflection. We introduce a technique to independently extract the amplitudes of these three effects using conventional magneto-optical single-side-illumination measurements. The observation of the resonant Tellegen effects in the optical frequency range may lead to the experimental observation of axionic electrodynamics and compact bias-free nonreciprocal optical devices.

The nonreciprocal magnetoelectric effect, also known as the Tellegen effect, promises a number of groundbreaking phenomena connected to fundamental (e.g., electrodynamics of axion and relativistic matter) and applied physics (e.g., magnetless isolators). We propose a three-dimensional metamaterial with an isotropic and resonant Tellegen response in the visible frequency range. The metamaterial is formed by randomly oriented bi-material nanocylinders in a host medium. Each nanocylinder consists of a ferromagnet in a single-domain magnetic state and a high-permittivity dielectric operating near the magnetic Mie-type resonance. The proposed metamaterial requires no external magnetic bias and operates on the spontaneous magnetization of the nanocylinders. By leveraging the emerging magnetic Weyl semimetals, we further show how a giant bulk effective magnetoelectric effect can be achieved in a proposed metamaterial, exceeding that of natural materials by almost four orders of magnitude.