Empowering plasmonics and metamaterials technology with new material platforms
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uction Optical technologies have advanced greatly from the first bulk components such as prisms, lenses, and mirrors based on materials provided to us by nature. The first major transformative advancement in the field was a set of optical devices and technologies based on diffraction and interference effects, where the optical components were structured on the wavelength scale (e.g., diffraction gratings, photonic crystals). Nowadays, as a result of recent tremendous developments in nanofabrication and nanotechnology, we are able to engineer nanostructured materials whose properties are defined not only by the constituent materials, but also by the design and geometry of their nanoscale building blocks. Unit cells—nanostructured, manmade “atoms”—are created
by design, and the resultant manmade materials appear uniform, completely new, and sometimes with exotic optical properties. These synthetic materials, made as an arrangement of artificial structural elements, are designed to demonstrate extraordinary, advantageous, and/or unusual properties called metamaterials.1–3 Current nanofabrication approaches allow us to create and arrange/assemble metamaterial unit cells or meta-atoms, giving the freedom to produce exciting new designs. Recently, the new research direction of studying novel constituent materials that can serve as building blocks for metamaterial devices has attracted a great deal of attention.4 The parameter space for optical metamaterial design is beginning to expand through the exploration of material “ingredients”;
Alexandra Boltasseva, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University, and the Technical University of Denmark; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.2014.91
© 2014 Materials Research Society
MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 39 • MAY 2014 • www.mrs.org/bulletin
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EMPOWERING PLASMONICS AND METAMATERIALS TECHNOLOGY WITH NEW MATERIAL PLATFORMS
we are not only choosing the designs of the unit cells and the arrangement that gives rise to unusual optical properties and functionalities, but also choosing the constituent materials that would best suit a particular metamaterial design. To achieve their radically new and sometimes exotic effects, optical metamaterials exploit another transformative concept in modern photonics, namely plasmonics. Plasmonics is a research field that merges the features of both photonics and electronics by coupling the energy and momentum of a photon to the collective oscillations of free electrons in metals. The subwavelength coupled oscillations known as surface plasmons (SPs) in the constituent metallic building blocks of plasmonic structures both enable a main missionary objective of plasmonics—to route and manipulate light at the nanoscale5–9—and the resonant properties of metamaterials. The fields of plasmonics and metamaterials are wellestablished, and there is no shortage of wonderful ideas and demonstrations of nanoscale devices and structures with unusual optical properties. These range from nanoscale optical waveguides and na
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