Metamaterials for Advanced Photonic and Plasmonic Applications – Selected Papers from Metamaterials’2018

A special issue of Photonics (ISSN 2304-6732).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2019) | Viewed by 26430

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Advanced Science Research Center, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA
Interests: metamaterials; nanophotonics; electromagnetics; acoustics

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Guest Editor
Department of Engineering, “Roma Tre” University, Rome, Italy
Interests: electromagnetics; metamaterials; plasmonics; metasurfaces

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Guest Editor
“Niccolò Cusano” University, Rome, Italy
Interests: metamaterials; plasmonics; nanophotonics; metasurfaces
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The 12th International Congress on Artificial Materials for Novel Wave Phenomena—Metamaterials’2018 will be held in Espoo (Finland), 27 August–1 September, 2018, and it will comprise a four-day conference and a two-day doctoral school. Since its first edition in 2007, the Metamaterials Congress has established itself as one of the most important forums, worldwide, for physicists, engineers, applied mathematicians and material scientists to share and discuss the latest results about complex materials for waves manipulation and control in all the involved scientific fields.

We are very glad to serve as Guest Editors of this Special Issue to be published in Photonics that will contain a selection of papers submitted and accepted at Metamaterials’2018. Its main scope is to provide a timely and broad collection of the most innovative topics discussed at the latest edition of the congress related to photonics and plasmonics. We warmly invite researchers to submit their contributions, both original research articles and review papers, to this Special Issue. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Fundamentals and applications of artificial materials and surfaces at infrared and optical frequencies;
  • Plasmonics and optical properties of metamaterials;
  • Novel optical effects enabled by metamaterials;
  • Experimental techniques and characterization of nanomaterials;
  • Biological and biomedical applications of metamaterials;
  • Metamaterials for nanoelectronics and nanophotonics;
  • Metamaterials for quantum electronics;
  • Energy harvesting and thermophotovoltaics;
  • Nanocarbon, nanotubes, graphene and bio-inspired materials

Prof. Dr. Andrea Alù
Prof. Dr. Filiberto Bilotti
Prof. Dr. Alessio Monti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Photonics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

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Keywords

  • complex materials and metamaterials
  • structured surfaces and metasurfaces
  • novel optical effects
  • nanomaterials, nanoparticles and nanoplasmonics
  • nonlinear, quantum, superconducting metamaterials
  • optical cloaking and transformation optics

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 3931 KiB  
Article
Numerical Analysis of Nonlocal Optical Response of Metallic Nanoshells
by Muhammad Khalid and Cristian Ciracì
Photonics 2019, 6(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6020039 - 08 Apr 2019
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 3452
Abstract
Nonlocal and quantum effects play an important role in accurately modeling the optical response of nanometer-sized metallic nanoparticles. These effects cannot be described by conventional classical theories, as they neglect essential microscopic details. Quantum hydrodynamic theory (QHT) has emerged as an excellent tool [...] Read more.
Nonlocal and quantum effects play an important role in accurately modeling the optical response of nanometer-sized metallic nanoparticles. These effects cannot be described by conventional classical theories, as they neglect essential microscopic details. Quantum hydrodynamic theory (QHT) has emerged as an excellent tool to correctly predict the nonlocal and quantum effects by taking into account the spatial dependence of the charge density. In this article, we used a QHT to investigate the impact of nonlocality and electron spill-out on the plasmonic behavior of spherical Na and Au nanoshells. We adopted a self-consistent way to compute the equilibrium charge density. The results predicted by QHT were compared with those obtained with the local response approximation (LRA) and the Thomas–Fermi hydrodynamic theory (TFHT). We found that nonlocal effects have a strong impact on both the near- and far-field optical properties of nanoshells, in particular, for the antibonding resonant mode. We also investigated the optical response of these systems for different thicknesses of the shell, both for Na and Au metals. Full article
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8 pages, 6783 KiB  
Article
Tuning Plasmon Induced Reflectance with Hybrid Metasurfaces
by Mohsin Habib, Ekmel Ozbay and Humeyra Caglayan
Photonics 2019, 6(1), 29; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6010029 - 16 Mar 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3048
Abstract
Electrically tunable metasurfaces with graphene offer design flexibility to efficiently manipulate and control light. These metasurfaces can be used to generate plasmon-induced reflectance (PIR), which can be tuned by electrostatic doping of the graphene layer. We numerically investigated two designs for tunable PIR [...] Read more.
Electrically tunable metasurfaces with graphene offer design flexibility to efficiently manipulate and control light. These metasurfaces can be used to generate plasmon-induced reflectance (PIR), which can be tuned by electrostatic doping of the graphene layer. We numerically investigated two designs for tunable PIR devices using the finite difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The first design is based on two rectangular antennas of the same size and a disk; in the second design, two parallel rectangular antennas with different dimensions are used. The PIR-effect was achieved by weak hybridization of two bright modes in both devices and tuned by changing the Fermi level of graphene. A total shift of ∼362 nm was observed in the design with the modulation depth of 53% and a spectral contrast ratio of 76%. These tunable PIR devices can be used for tunable enhanced biosensing and switchable systems. Full article
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11 pages, 2574 KiB  
Article
The Design of Optical Circuit-Analog Absorbers through Electrically Small Nanoparticles
by Alessio Monti, Andrea Alù, Alessandro Toscano and Filiberto Bilotti
Photonics 2019, 6(1), 26; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6010026 - 06 Mar 2019
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3942
Abstract
In the last few years, the perfect absorption of light has become an important research topic due to its dramatic impact in photovoltaics, photodetectors, color filters and thermal emitters. While broadband optical absorption is relatively easy to achieve using bulky devices, today there [...] Read more.
In the last few years, the perfect absorption of light has become an important research topic due to its dramatic impact in photovoltaics, photodetectors, color filters and thermal emitters. While broadband optical absorption is relatively easy to achieve using bulky devices, today there is a strong need and interest in achieving the same effects by employing nanometric structures that are compatible with modern nanophotonic components. In this paper, we propose a general procedure to design broadband nanometer-scale absorbers working in the optical spectrum. The proposed devices, which can be considered an extension to optics of microwave circuit-analog absorbers, consist of several layers containing arrays of elongated nanoparticles, whose dimensions are engineered to control both the absorption level and the operational bandwidth. By combining a surface-impedance homogenization and an equivalent transmission-line formalism, we define a general analytical procedure that can be employed to achieve a final working design. As a relevant example, we show that the proposed approach allows designing an optical absorber exhibiting a 20% fractional bandwidth on a thickness of λ/4 at the central frequency of operation. Full-wave results confirming the effectiveness of the analytical findings, as well as some considerations about the experimental realization of the proposed devices are provided. Full article
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11 pages, 2077 KiB  
Article
Photonic Inverse Design of Simple Particles with Realistic Losses in the Visible Frequency Range
by Constantinos Valagiannopoulos
Photonics 2019, 6(1), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6010023 - 28 Feb 2019
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3839
Abstract
Billions of U.S. dollars of basic and applied research funding have been invested during the last few years in ideas proposing inverse concepts. The photonics market could not make an exception to this global trend, and thus, several agenda-setting research groups have already [...] Read more.
Billions of U.S. dollars of basic and applied research funding have been invested during the last few years in ideas proposing inverse concepts. The photonics market could not make an exception to this global trend, and thus, several agenda-setting research groups have already started providing sophisticated tools, constrained optimization algorithms, and selective evolution techniques towards this direction. Here, we present an approach of inverse design based on the exhaustive trial-and-testing of the available media and changing the physical dimensions’ range according to the operational wavelength. The proposed technique is applied to the case of an optimal radiation-enhancing cylindrical particle fed by a line source of visible light and gives a two-order increase in the magnitude of the produced signal. Full article
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14 pages, 15136 KiB  
Article
Subwavelength Hexahedral Plasmonic Scatterers: History, Symmetries, and Resonant Characteristics
by Dimitrios Tzarouchis, Pasi Ylä-Oijala and Ari Sihvola
Photonics 2019, 6(1), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6010018 - 25 Feb 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3055
Abstract
In this work, we investigate the resonant characteristics of hexahedral (cubical) inclusions at the plasmonic domain. After an introduction to the notion of superquadric surfaces, i.e., surfaces that model various versions of a rounded cube, we present the main resonant spectrum and the [...] Read more.
In this work, we investigate the resonant characteristics of hexahedral (cubical) inclusions at the plasmonic domain. After an introduction to the notion of superquadric surfaces, i.e., surfaces that model various versions of a rounded cube, we present the main resonant spectrum and the surface distributions for two particular cases of a smooth and a sharp cube in the plasmonic domain. We present a historical comparative overview of the main contributions available since the 1970s. A new categorization scheme of the resonances of a cube is introduced, based on symmetry considerations. The obtained results are compared against several recent works, exposing that the higher-order modes are extremely susceptible to both the choice of sharpness of the cube and the modeling mesh. This work can be readily used as a reference for both historical and contemporary studies of the plasmonic aspects of a cube. Full article
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11 pages, 892 KiB  
Article
Grating Lobes in Higher-Order Correlation Functions of Arrays of Quantum Emitters: Directional Photon Bunching Versus Correlated Directions
by Iñigo Liberal, Iñigo Ederra and Richard W. Ziolkowski
Photonics 2019, 6(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6010014 - 12 Feb 2019
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3416
Abstract
Recent advances in nanofabrication and optical manipulation techniques are making it possible to build arrays of quantum emitters with accurate control over the locations of their individual elements. In analogy with classical antenna arrays, this poses new opportunities for tailoring quantum interference effects [...] Read more.
Recent advances in nanofabrication and optical manipulation techniques are making it possible to build arrays of quantum emitters with accurate control over the locations of their individual elements. In analogy with classical antenna arrays, this poses new opportunities for tailoring quantum interference effects by designing the geometry of the array. Here, we investigate the N th -order directional correlation function of the photons emitted by an array of N initially-excited identical quantum emitters, addressing the impact of the appearance of grating lobes. Our analysis reveals that the absence of directivity in the first-order correlation function is contrasted by an enhanced directivity in the N th -order one. This suggests that the emitted light consists of a superposition of directionally entangled photon bunches. Moreover, the photon correlation landscape changes radically with the appearance of grating lobes. In fact, the photons no longer tend to be bunched along the same direction; rather, they are distributed in a set of correlated directions with equal probability. These results clarify basic aspects of light emission from ensembles of quantum emitters. Furthermore, they may find applications in the design of nonclassical light sources. Full article
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7 pages, 5431 KiB  
Article
Holography Using Curved Metasurfaces
by James Burch and Andrea Di Falco
Photonics 2019, 6(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics6010008 - 26 Jan 2019
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 5042
Abstract
In this work, we demonstrate nonflat metasurface holograms with applications in imaging, sensing, and anticounterfeiting. For these holograms, the image and its symmetry properties, with respect to the polarization of the light, depend on the specific shape of the substrate. Additionally, the sensitivity [...] Read more.
In this work, we demonstrate nonflat metasurface holograms with applications in imaging, sensing, and anticounterfeiting. For these holograms, the image and its symmetry properties, with respect to the polarization of the light, depend on the specific shape of the substrate. Additionally, the sensitivity of the holographic image to the substrate shape can be engineered by distributing the phase information into determined areas of the metasurface. Full article
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