Hyperbolic metamaterials: fusing artificial structures to natural 2D materials

Abstract

Optical metamaterials have presented an innovative method of manipulating light. Hyperbolic metamaterials have an extremely high anisotropy with a hyperbolic dispersion relation. They are able to support high-k modes and exhibit a high density of states which produce distinctive properties that have been exploited in various applications, such as super-resolution imaging, negative refraction, and enhanced emission control. Here, state-of-the-art hyperbolic metamaterials are reviewed, starting from the fundamental principles to applications of artificially structured hyperbolic media to suggest ways to fuse natural two-dimensional hyperbolic materials. The review concludes by indicating the current challenges and our vision for future applications of hyperbolic metamaterials.

Nanophotonics shines light on hyperbolic metamaterials

“…Type-II HMMs are highly reflective and are more absorptive than Type-I HMMs 3 . This Review by Lee et al 1 highlights different nanophotonic structures that have been developed to support hyperbolic dispersion for HMMs. These structures include multilayer HMM (Fig.…”

“…In the metamaterials family, hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) have attracted strong interest due to their unique and extreme anisotropy that renders the metamaterials to behave like a metal in one direction and a dielectric in the other. Writing in eLight , Dasol Lee, Sunae So, Guangwei Hu, Cheng-Wei Qiu, Junsuk Rho, and colleagues now provide a comprehensive review on HMMs from fundamentals to applications, covering both artificial metamaterials and recently discovered natural 2D materials that support hyperbolic dispersion 1 .…”

“…The real part of the metal permittivity is negative at frequencies below the plasma frequency, so the nanowire HMMs can exhibit Type-I HMM behavior without the requirement of an optical resonance. Consequently, they can operate at a relatively low loss and high transmission over a large bandwidth, although the electrochemical deposition method to date has a limited choice of materials 1 .…”

“…In summary, this Review by Lee et al 1 introduces nanophotonic concepts of hyperbolic materials with the fundamental principles necessary for an insightful understanding, and presents nanofabrication and characterization details essential to experimentalists. Some future challenges and perspectives in the field are discussed as well, offering important guidance for future work.…”

Optically Transparent Low Scattering Metasurface Based on Polarization Conversion‐Diffusion‐Absorption Integration Mechanism

“…[1] With the continuous development of radar detection technology to the trend of low-frequency and multi-frequency, stealth materials with the characteristics of small physical space occupancy, low working frequency, wide frequency band, and low detectability have gradually become the research focus in this field. [2,3] As an important development direction of advanced electromagnetic materials, metamaterials, the artificial microstructure composed of periodic sub-wavelength meta-atoms, break through the limitation of the natural material properties on electromagnetic properties, [4,5] realizes static and dynamic modulation of the amplitude, frequency, and polarization of electromagnetic waves and have made breakthroughs in stealth materials, [3,6,7] microwave devices [8,9] and even in quantum photonics. [10] Currently, there are two main approaches to achieve low backscattering using artificial structures or metamaterials.…”