Research by PhD Student Artem Hrinchenko Receives a Prestigious Distinction from Physical Review A

The research paper by university PhD student Artem Hrinchenko, titled “Generalized transverse-electric Brewster effect and perfect absorption with reflectionless plasmonic metasurfaces,” has been selected for the Editors’ Suggestion list and the Highlights of the journal Physical Review A.

The authors demonstrated the phenomena of perfect absorption and zero reflection of light at tunable angles enabled by a two-dimensional metallic nanostructure.

The Editors’ Suggestion distinction is a mark of exceptional quality awarded by the editors to only about 3% of submitted articles, highlighting works considered particularly important, interesting, and exceptionally well written.

Over the past ten years, only about 900 papers out of more than 24,000 published have received this distinction. In the field of photonics, this paper is only the eighth Editors’ Suggestion among over 330 works published in 2025.

Two hundred and ten years ago, Sir David Brewster discovered the polarization phenomenon now known as the Brewster’s law or Brewster angle. Brewster defined the angle of incidence at which light reflected from a dielectric surface becomes fully polarized. This effect underlies polarization filters in photo and video cameras, anti-reflective coatings, optical sensors, and detectors of ultrathin layers just a few atoms thick.

In their new article, the authors show that nanostructured two-dimensional systems allow for controlling the Brewster angle in TE polarization — that is, shifting the Brewster phenomenon to any desired angle of incidence.

In particular, the authors investigate the scenario in which the TE Brewster angle is shifted into the region of total internal reflection. In this regime, without the nanostructure, light is completely reflected and does not transmit into the second medium. However, if a “sandwich” is created by adding a specially designed two-dimensional nanostructure between the two media, all incident light is fully absorbed — forming a so-called “perfect absorber.”

The authors propose a practical design of such a nanostructure in the form of a periodic array of thin gold nanodisks and numerically model the described effects, demonstrating switching between the Brewster angle and the perfect absorber for TE-polarized light. These results complement the standard understanding of the Brewster phenomenon for TM-polarized light and provide efficient control of light of any polarization.

The study was carried out with the support of the Ukrainian Society for Optics and Photonics.