No Arabic abstract
In recent years significant efforts have been made to design and fabricate functional nanomaterials for biomedical applications based on the control of light matter interaction at the nanometer scale. Among many other artificial materials, hyperbolic dispersion metamaterials allow to access unprecedented physical effects and mechanisms due to the extreme anisotropy of their optical constants. The unbound isofrequency surface of hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) enable the possibility to support a virtually infinite density of states and ultra-high confinement of electromagnetic fields, allowing perfect absorption of light and extreme sensing properties. Optical sensor technology based on plasmonic metamaterials offers significant opportunities in the field of clinical diagnostics, particularly for the detection of low-molecular-weight biomolecules in highly diluted solutions. In this context, we present a computational effort to engineer a biosensing platform based on hyperbolic metamaterials, supporting highly confined bulk plasmon modes integrated with out-of-plane chiral metasurfaces. The role of the helicoidal chiral metasurface is manifold: i) as a diffractive element to increase the momentum of the incoming light to excite the plasmon sensing modes with linearly and circularly polarized light; ii) as out-of-plane extended sensing surface to capture target analytes away from the substrate thereby the diffusion limit; iii) as a plamonic chiral nanostructure with enhanced sensing performance over circularly polarized reflectance light.
Recent advances in hyperbolic metamaterials have spurred many breakthroughs in the field of manipulating light propagation. However, the unusual electromagnetic properties also put extremely high demands on its compositional materials. Limited by the finite relative permittivity of the natural materials, the effective permittivity of the constructed hyperbolic metamaterials is also confined to a narrow range. Here, based on the proposed concept of structure-induced spoof surface plasmon, we prove that arbitrary materials can be selected to construct the hyperbolic metamaterials with independent relative effective permittivity components. Besides, the theoretical achievable ranges of the relative effective permittivity components are unlimited. As proofs of the method, three novel hyperbolic metamaterials are designed with their functionalities validated numerically and experimentally by specified directional propagation. To further illustrate the superiority of the method, an all-metal low-loss hyperbolic metamaterial filled with air is proposed and demonstrated. The proposed methodology effectively reduces the design requirement for hyperbolic metamaterials and provides new ideas for the scenarios where large permittivity coverage is needed such as microwave and terahertz focus, super-resolution imaging, electromagnetic cloaking, and so on.
Recently, we proposed a metasurface design for chiral sensing that (i) results in enhanced chiroptical signals by more than two orders of magnitude for ultrathin, subwavelength, chiral samples over a uniform and accessible area, (ii) allows for complete measurements of the total chirality (magnitude and sign of both its real and imaginary part), and (iii) offers the possibility for a crucial signal reversal (excitation with reversed polarization) that enables chirality measurements in an absolute manner, i.e., without the need for sample removal. Our design is based on the anisotropic response of the metasurface, rather than the superchirality of the generated near-fields, as in most contemporary nanophotonic-based chiral sensing approaches. Here, we derive analytically, and verify numerically, simple formulas that provide insight to the sensing mechanism and explain how anisotropic metasurfaces, in general, offer additional degrees of freedom with respect to their isotropic counterparts. We provide a detailed discussion of the key functionalities and benefits of our proposed design and we demonstrate practical measurement schemes for the unambiguous determination of an unknown chirality. Last, we provide the design principles towards broadband operation - from near-infrared to near-ultraviolet frequencies - opening the way for highly sensitive nanoscale chiroptical spectroscopy.
Advances in graphene plasmonics offer numerous opportunities for enabling the design and manufacture of a variety of nanoelectronics and other exciting optical devices. However, due to the limitation of material properties, its operating frequency cannot drop to the microwave range. In this work, a new concept of microwave equivalent graphene based on the ultrathin monolayer plasmonic metasurface is proposed and demonstrated. Based on this concept, elliptical and hyperbolic dispersion can be theoretically obtained by stacking the equivalent graphene metasurfaces periodically. As proofs of the concept and method, an elliptical and an all-metal hyperbolic metamaterial are designed and numerically demonstrated. As a specified realization of the method, a practical hyperbolic metamaterial is fabricated and experimentally investigated with its validity verified by the directional propagation and photonic spin Hall effect. Furthermore, to investigate the validity of the method under extreme parameter conditions, a proof-of-concept hyperlens is designed and fabricated, with its near-field resolution of 0.05$lambda$ experimentally verified. Based on the proposed concept, diverse optical graphene metamaterials such as focusing lens, dispersion-dependent directional couplers, and epsilon-near-zero materials can also be realized in the microwave regime.
We reveal the existence of a new type of surface electromagnetic waves supported by hyperbolic metasurfaces, described by a conductivity tensor with an indefinite signature. We demonstrate that the spectrum of the hyperbolic metasurface waves consists of two branches corresponding to hybrid TE-TM waves with the polarization that varies from linear to elliptic or circular depending on the wave frequency and propagation direction. We analyze the effect of losses of the surface waves and derive the corresponding analytical asymptotic expressions.
The implementation of hyperbolic metamaterials as component in optical waveguides, semiconductor light emitters and solar cells has been limited by the inherent loss in the metallic layers. The features of a hyperbolic metamaterial arise by the presence of alternating metal and a dielectric layers. This work proposes that the deleterious loss characteristic of metal-based hyperbolic metamaterials can be minimized by employing a III-nitride superlattice wherein a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) functions as the metallic layer.