Comment on 'Nonreciprocal Light Propagation in a Silicon Photonic Circuit'

Comment on 'Nonreciprocal Light Propagation in a&n

S. Fan, R. Baets, A. Petrov, Z. Yu, J. D. Joannopoulos, W. Freude, A. Melloni, M. Popović, M. Vanwolleghem, D. Jalas, M. Eich, M. Krause, H. Renner, E. Brinkmeyer, C. R. Doerr,
Comment on 'Nonreciprocal Light Propagation in a Silicon Photonic Circuit'
Science 335, p. 38 (2012)

Abstract: We show that the structure demonstrated by Feng et al. (Science, vol. 333, 2011) cannot enable optical isolation because it possesses a symmetric scattering matrix. Moreover, one cannot construct an optical isolator by incorporating this structure into any system as long as the system is linear and time-independent and is described by materials with a scalar dielectric function.

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