Short-pulsed temporal metamaterials

We explore a class of temporal metamaterials characterized by a time-varying dielectric permittivity waveform of duration much smaller than the characteristic wave-dynamical timescale. For these short-pulsed metamaterials (SPMs), we study the interaction with an electromagnetic wavepacket, and we identify intriguing configurations for which analog-computing functionalities (first and second derivatives) can be attained. Our proposed SPMs can be viewed as the temporal counterpart of spatial metasurfaces, and may open up new perspectives within the framework of space-time metastructures.