Highly-anisotropic plasmonic nanotubes exhibit a dramatic drop of the scattering cross section in the transition regime from hyperbolic to elliptic dispersion. The characterization of a realistic multilayered metamaterial is typically carried out by means of an effective medium approach providing average components of the permittivity tensor and wave fields. Here, the edge effects of the metal-dielectric stratified nanotube for different combinations were thoroughly analyzed. We show how the boundary layers, which in principle remain fully irrelevant in the estimation of the effective permittivity of the nanotube, however play a critical role in the resonant scattering spectra and the near field patterns. A remarkable enhancement of the scattered wave field is unexpectedly experienced at the frequencies of interest when a dielectric layer is chosen to be in contact with the cavity core.

Abstract:An optimization for multilayered nanotubes that minimizes the scattering efficiency for a given polarization is derived. The cylindrical nanocavities have a radially periodic distribution, and the marginal layers that play a crucial role particularly in the presence of nonlocalities are disposed to reduce the scattering efficiency up to two orders of magnitude in comparison with previous proposals. The predominant causes leading to such invisibility effect are critically discussed. A transfer-matrix formalism is additionally developed for the fast estimation of the scattering efficiency of the nanostructures.

We show that a wide-angle converging wave may be transformed into a shape-preserving accelerating beam having a beam-width near the diffraction limit. For that purpose, we followed a strategy that is particularly conceived for the acceleration of nonparaxial laser beams, in contrast to the well-known method by Siviloglou et al (2007 Phys. Rev. Lett. 99 213901). The concept of optical near-field shaping is applied to the design of non-flat ultra-narrow diffractive optical elements. The engineered curvilinear caustic can be set up by the beam emerging from a dynamic assembly of elementary gratings, the latter enabling to modify the effective refractive index of the metamaterial as it is arranged in controlled orientations. This light shaping process, besides being of theoretical interest, is expected to open up a wide range of broadband application possibilities.

The volume size of a converging wave, which plays a relevant role in image resolution, is governed by the wavelength of the radiation and the numerical aperture (NA) of the wavefront. We designed an ultrathin (λ∕8 width) curved metasurface that is able to transform a focused field into a high-NA optical architecture, thus boosting the transverse and (mainly) on-axis resolution. The elements of the metasurface are metal-insulator subwavelength gratings exhibiting extreme anisotropy with ultrahigh index of refraction for TM polarization. Our results can be applied to nanolithography and optical microscopy.

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