Spontaneous isotropy breaking for vortices in nonlinear left-handed metamaterials
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Date
2019-11-25
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Journal Title
Physical Review A
Volume Title
100
Article Title
053853
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Abstract
We explore numerically and analytically the pattern formation and symmetry breaking of beams propagating through left-handed (negative) nonlinear metamaterials. When the input beam is a vortex with topological charge (winding number) Q, the initially circular (isotropic) beam acquires the symmetry of a polygon with Q, 2Q, or 3Q sides, depending on the details of the response functions of the material. Within an effective field-theory model, this phenomenon turns out to be a case of spontaneous dynamical symmetry breaking described by a Landau-Ginzburg functional. Complex nonlinear dependence of the magnetic permittivity on the magnetic field of the beam plays a central role, as it introduces branch cuts in the mean-field solution, and permutations among different branches give rise to discrete symmetries of the patterns. By considering loop correc.