Ultrafast All-Optical Polarization Control via Symmetry Breaking in an Au Nanorod Dimer Metamaterial
The continuous evolution of ultrafast optical technologies requires advanced solutions for the dynamic and selective manipulation of light's degrees of freedom. While metamaterials excel at tailoring these properties through static geometrical design, achieving sub-picosecond, all-optical dynamic control without sacrificing signal throughput remains a fundamental challenge. Here, an Au orthogonal nanorod dimer plasmonic metasurface capable of ultrafast, transmissive control over the ellipticity, and optical rotation of light is presented. By exploiting the transient optical nonlinearity of Au under femtosecond excitation, hot-electron generation can be selectively induced in either nanorod by leveraging the pronounced geometric anisotropy of the unit cell. The transient response is captured by coupling a Three-Temperature Model (3TM) with Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulations. This ultrafast response is driven by non-thermal electron excitation, rapid electron-electron thermalization, and subsequent lattice heating, which dynamically break the optical symmetry of the orthogonal localized surface plasmon (LSP) modes supported by the dimers. Crucially, this active mode-mixing drives sub-picosecond polarization switching, reaching peak shifts of approximately 10 degrees in ellipticity and up to approximately 20 degrees in optical rotation with an instantaneous response and a relaxation time of approximately 3 ps, while the absolute amplitude of the transmitted signal is only weakly perturbed. By achieving macroscopic transmissive polarization shifts alongside a highly stable 40% transmission efficiency, this platform overcomes the severe optical attenuation and geometric constraints that bottleneck existing nonlinear architectures, paving the way for low-latency, high-speed optical switches and modulators essential for next-generation nanophotonic networks.