A plasmonic "molecule" consisting of a radiative element coupled with a sub-radiant (dark) element is theoretically investigated. The plasmonic "molecule" shows close resemblance to the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in an atomic system. Because of its sub-wavelength dimension, this EIT-like "molecule" can be used as building block to construct a "slow light" plasmonic metamaterial.
We demonstrate polarization controlled absorption in plasmonic bimetallic metamaterials. We fabricate and experimentally characterize Au/Ni ring resonator arrays, where by varying the wavelength and polarization of the incident wave, local electromagnetic fields and dissipation can be suppressed or enhanced in the Au and Ni areas of the rings.
Hyperbolic plasmonic metamaterials provide numerous opportunities for designing unusual linear and nonlinear optical properties. We show that the modal overlap of fundamental and second-harmonic light in an anisotropic plasmonic metamaterial slab results in the broadband enhancement of radiated second-harmonic intensity by up to 2 orders of magnitudes for TM- and TE-polarized fundamental light, compared to a smooth Au film under TM-polarised illumination. The results open up possibilities to design tuneable frequency-doubling metamaterial with the goal to overcome limitations associated with c…
Noble metals that currently dominate the fields of plasmonics and metamaterials suffer from large ohmic losses. New plasmonic materials, such as doped oxides and nitrides, have smaller material loss, and, using them in place of metals carries promise of reduced-loss plasmonic and metamaterial structures, with sharper resonances and higher field concentration. This promise is put to a rigorous analytical test in this work which reveals that having low material loss is not sufficient to have a reduced modal loss in plasmonic structures. To reduce the modal loss it is absolutely necessary for the…
A tri-layer metamaterial perfect absorber of light, consisting of (Al/ZnS/Al) films with the top aluminium layer patterned as an array of circular disk nanoantennas, is investigated for resonantly enhancing Raman scattering from C-60 fullerene molecules deposited on the metamaterial. The metamaterial is designed to have resonant bands due to plasmonic and electromagnetic resonances at the Raman pump frequency (725 nm) as well as Stokes emission bands. The Raman scattering from C60 on the metamaterial with resonantly matched bands is measured to be enhanced by an order of magnitude more than fr…
Despite more than a decade of active research, the fundamental problem of material loss remains a major obstacle in fulfilling the promise of the recently emerged fields of metamaterials and plasmonics to bring in revolutionary practical applications. In the present work, we demonstrate that the problem of strong material absorption that is inherent to plasmonic systems and metamaterials based on plasmonic components, can be addressed by utilizing the time dimension. By matching the pulse profile to the actual response of a lossy metamaterial, this approach allows to offset the effect of the m…
We demonstrate resonant Faraday polarization rotation in plasmonic arrays of bimetallic nano-ring resonators consisting of Au and Ni sections. This metamaterial design allows to optimize the trade-off between the enhancement of magneto-optical effects and plasmonic dissipation. Although Ni sections correspond to as little as ~6% of the total surface of the metamaterial, the resulting magneto-optically induced polarization rotation is equal to that of a continuous film. Such bimetallic metamaterials can be used in compact magnetic sensors, active plasmonic components and integrated photonic cir…
We consider an array of the meta-atom consisting of two cut-wires and a split-ring resonator interacting with an electromagnetic field with two polarization components. We prove that such metamaterial system can be taken as a classical analogue of an atomic medium with a double- $Λ$-type four-level configuration coupled with four laser fields, exhibits an effect of plasmon induced transparency (PIT), and displays a similar behavior of atomic four-wave mixing (FWM). We demonstrate that when nonlinear varactors are mounted onto the gaps of the split-ring resonators the system can acquire giant s…
Optical manipulation has attracted remarkable interest owing to its versatile and non-invasive nature. However, conventional optical trapping remains inefficient for the nanoscopic world. The emergence of plasmonics in recent years has brought a revolutionary change in overcoming limitations due to diffraction and the requirements for high trapping laser powers. Among the near-field optical trapping cavity-based systems, Fano resonant optical tweezers have a robust trapping capability. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate sequential trapping of 20 nm particles through the use of metamat…
Designing broadband enhanced chirality is of strong interest to the emerging fields of chiral chemistry and sensing, or to control the spin orbital momentum of photons in recently introduced nanophotonic chiral quantum and classical optical applications. However, chiral light-matter interactions have an extremely weak nature, are difficult to be controlled and enhanced, and cannot be made tunable or broadband. In addition, planar ultrathin nanophotonic structures to achieve strong, broadband, and tunable chirality at the technologically important visible to ultraviolet spectrum still remain el…
Metamaterials with artificial optical properties have attracted significant research interest. In particular, artificial magnetic resonances in non-unity permeability tensor at optical frequencies in metamaterials have been reported. However, only non-unity diagonal elements of the permeability tensor have been demonstrated to date. A gyromagnetic permeability tensor with non-zero off-diagonal elements has not been observed at the optical frequencies. Here we report the observation of gyromagnetic properties in the near-infrared wavelength range in a magneto-plasmonic metamaterial. The non-zer…
The metamaterial analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in terahertz (THz) regime holds fascinating prospects for filling the THz gap in various functional devices. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid metamaterial to actively manipulate the resonance strength of EIT effect. By integrating a monolayer graphene into a THz metal metamaterial, an on-to-off modulation of the EIT transparency window is achieved under different Fermi levels of graphene. According to the classical two-particle model and the distributions of the electric field and surface charge density, the ph…
Optical activity is a fundamental phenomenon originating from the chiral nature of crystals and molecules. While intrinsic chiroptical responses of ordinary chiral materials to circularly polarized light are relatively weak, they can be enhanced by specially tailored nanostructures. Here, nanorod metamaterials, comprising a dense array of vertically aligned gold nanorods, is shown to provide significant enhancement of the circular dichroism response of an embedded material. A nanorod composite, acting as an artificial uniaxial crystal, is filled with chiral mercury sulfide nanocrystals embedde…
In this article, a 2D plasmonic waveguide loaded with all dielectric anisotropic metamaterial, consisting of alternative layers of Si-SiO2, has been theoretically proposed and numerically analyzed. Main characteristics of waveguide i.e. propagation constant, propagation length and normalized mode area have been calculated for different values of ridge width and height at telecommunication wavelength. The respective 1D structure of the waveguide has been analytically solved for the anisotropic ridge as a single uniaxial medium with dielectric tensor defined by Effective Medium Theory (EMT). The…
The spectral response of a plasmonic nanostructure may heavily depend on the refractive index of its surroundings. The key idea of this paper is to control this response by coherent optical means, i.e. with an optically controlled electromagnetically-induced-transparency medium. In such environment, an external laser provides a knob to shift the position of plasmonic resonances without the need to change the geometry of the nanostructure. Additionally, the setup can be exploited to excite narrow-band surface plasmon polaritons.
Extreme mid-infrared field enhancement and anapoles in high-index plasmonic metamaterials
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学物理与天文学学院）；NanoPhotonics Centre, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学卡文迪许实验室纳米光子学中心）
In this paper, we proposed a theoretical model in the far-infrared and terahertz (THz) bands, which is a dumbbell-shaped graphene metamaterial arrays with a combination of graphene nanorod and two semisphere-suspended heads. We report a detailed theoretical investigation on how to enhance localized electric field and the absorption in the dumbbell-shaped graphene metamaterial arrays. The simulation results show that by changing the geometrical parameters of the structure and the Fermi level of graphene, we can change the absorption characteristics. Furthermore, we have discovered that the reso…
We demonstrate analytically and numerically that the dispersive Dirac cone emulating an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) behavior is a universal property within a family of plasmonic crystals consisting of two-dimensional (2D) metals. Our starting point is a periodic array of 2D metallic sheets embedded in an inhomogeneous and anisotropic dielectric host that allows for propagation of transverse-magnetic (TM) polarized waves. By invoking a systematic bifurcation argument for arbitrary dielectric profiles in one spatial dimension, we show how TM Bloch waves experience an effective dielectric function th…
The key feature of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) emitter is the enhancement of thermal emission corresponding to energies just above the bandgap of the absorbing photovoltaic cell and simultaneous suppression of thermal emission below the bandgap. We show here that a single layer plasmonic coating can perform this task with high efficiency. Our key design principle involves tuning the epsilon-near-zero frequency (plasma frequency) of the metal acting as a thermal emitter to the electronic bandgap of the semiconducting cell. This approach utilizes the change in reflectivity of a metal near its pla…
A novel mechanism to realize dynamically tunable electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) analogue in the terahertz (THz) regime is proposed. By putting the electrically controllable monolayer graphene under the dark resonator, the amplitude of the EIT resonance in the metal-based metamaterial can be modulated substantially via altering the Fermi level of graphene. The amplitude modulation can be attributed to the change in the damping rate of the dark mode caused by the recombination effect of the conductive graphene. This work provides an alternative way to achieve tunable slow light e…
It is theoretically and numerically demonstrated that a mixture of two topologically distinct material phases is characterized by an anomalous "transparency window" in a spectral range wherein the individual material phases are strongly reflecting. In particular, it is shown that a metamaterial formed by a metallic wire grid embedded in a magnetized plasma may support the propagation of waves with long wavelengths, notwithstanding the components, when taken separately, completely block the electromagnetic radiation. The effect is explained in terms of the topological properties of the magnetop…
In this article, we propose a programmable plasmonic waveguide system (PPWS) to achieve several different functions based on metal coding metamaterials (MCMs) and inverse design technology. There is no need to spend much time on considering the relation between the function and the structure because the MCMs in the PPWS are reprogrammable. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the PPWS, we utilize it to achieve several filtering functions, including bandstop and bandpass filters. The simulation results exhibit that the performance of filters is improved based on genetic algorithm, parti…
