The importance of tunable subwavelength optical devices in modern electromagnetic and photonic systems is indisputable. Herein, a lithography-free, wide-angle, and reconfigurable subwavelength optical device with high tunability operating in the near-infrared regions is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, based on a reversible nanochemistry approach. The reconfigurable subwavelength optical device basically comprises an ultrathin copper oxide (CuO) thin film on an optical thick gold substrate by utilizing the reversible chemical conversion of CuO to sulfides upon exposure to hydrogen sulfide gas. Proof-of-concept experimental results show that the maximal modulation depth of reflectance can be as high as 90% at the wavelength of 1.79 μm with the initial thickness of CuO taken as 150 nm. Partially reflected wave calculations combined with the transfer matrix method are employed to analytically investigate the optical properties of the structure, which show good agreement with experimental results. We believe that the proposed versatile approaches can be implemented for dynamic control management, allowing applications in tunable photonics, active displays, optical encryption, and gas sensing.

We experimentally investigated the forward 353.8 nm radiation from plasma filaments in pure nitrogen gas pumped by intense circularly polarized 800 nm femtosecond laser pulses. This emission line corresponds to the B2Σu+(v′=4)?X2Σg+(v=3) transition of nitrogen ions. In the presence of an external seeding pulse, the 353.8 nm signal was amplified by 3 orders of magnitude. Thanks to the much enhanced intensity, we performed time-resolved measurement of the amplified 353.8 nm emission based on the sum-frequency generation technique. It was revealed that the built-up time and duration of these emissions are both inversely proportional to the gas pressure, while the radiation peak power grows up nearly quadratically with pressure, indicating that the 353.8 nm radiation is of the nature of superradiance.