Electromagnetic metamaterials (MMs) and metasurfaces (MSs) are artificial media and surfaces with subwavelength separations of meta-atoms designed for anomalous manipulations of light properties. Owing to large scattering cross-sections of metallic/dielectric meta-atoms, it is possible to not only localize strong electromagnetic fields in deep subwavelength volume but also decompose and analyze incident light signal with ultracompact setup using MMs and MSs. Hence, by probing resonant spectral responses from extremely boosted interactions between analyte layer and optical MMs or MSs, sensing the variation of refractive index has been a popular and practical application in the field of photonics. Moreover, decomposing and analyzing incident light signal can be easily achieved with anisotropic MSs, which can scatter light to different directions according to its polarization or wavelength. In this paper, we present recent advances and potential applications of optical MMs and MSs for refractive index sensing and sensing light properties, which can be easily integrated with various electronic devices. The characteristics and performances of devices are summarized and compared qualitatively with suggestions of design guidelines.
Color generation based on strategically designed plasmonic nanostructures is a promising approach for display applications with unprecedented high-resolution. However, it is disadvantageous in that the optical response is fixed once the structure is determined. Therefore, obtaining high modulation depth with reversible optical properties while maintaining its fixed nanostructure is a great challenge in nanophotonics. In this work, dynamic color tuning and switching using tungsten trioxide (WO 3 ), a representative electrochromic material, are demonstrated with reflection-type and transmission-type optical devices. Thin WO 3 films incorporated in simple stacked configurations undergo dynamic color change by the adjustment of their dielectric constant through the electrochromic principle. A large resonance wavelength shift up to 107 nm under an electrochemical bias of 3.2 V could be achieved by the reflection-type device. For the transmission-type device, on/off switchable color pixels with improved purity are demonstrated of which transmittance is modulated by up to 4.04:1.
Metalens is one of the most prominent applications among metasurfaces since it gives possibilities to replace the conventional lenses for compactness and multi-functionalities. Recently, many studies have been demonstrated to overcome the aberrations of the metalenses for high performance practical applications. Previous studies have used the methods that control the dispersion of meta-atoms for correcting chromatic aberrations and use doublet platform for correcting monochromatic aberrations. Despite these studies and the large demands for simultaneous correction of the aberrations in high numerical aperture metalens, the simultaneous correction has not been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we report the doublet metalens design with high numerical aperture which corrects longitudinal chromatic aberration and four monochromatic aberrations including spherical aberration, coma, astigmatism, and field curvature simultaneously for the three primary visible colors. Based on the novel doublet platform, the multi-wavelength targeted correction lens and geometric phase lens with color filtering functionality are utilized. Our doublet metalens has numerical apertures of 0.33, 0.38, and 0.47 for 445 nm, 532 nm, and 660 nm, respectively. The back focal length of our doublet metalens remains nearly 360 µm for target wavelengths and incident angles up to 30 degrees.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.