Optical Sorting of a Plasmonic or Dielectric or Chiral Mie Object Using a Single Metasurface

Abstract

Identifying an object, be it of dielectric or plasmonic or chiral nature, by only using light beam is familiarized as optical sorting. As far as is known, a single optical setup is not reported so far, where these three different kinds of Mie sized particles can exhibit completely distinct behaviors. Chemical-based sorting of these various types of particles is still considered as a notable industrial problem due to the use of very expensive chemicals. This work presents a novel all-optical technique to distinguish classes of nanoscale Mie objects by separately placing them over a metasurface consisting of double-lined gold nanostructures. The proposed setup promotes an effective on-chip material-based optical sorting of silica (a dielectric object), gold (a plasmonic object), and chiral nanospheres by generating a dual surface plasmon polariton (SPP) energized plasmonic complex field, which induces fully different behaviors in Mie scatterers having dissimilar material properties. For instance, when simple plane wave is imposed underneath the metasurface, plasmonic object experiences the counterintuitive optical pulling force, dielectric object experiences pushing force, whereas the chiral object experiences optical lateral force. The proposed optical setup may introduce a new method of all-optical sorting without using chemicals or costly materials.

Metasurface Micro/Nano-Optical Sensors: Principles and Applications

“…The spin angular momentum of the output beam is defined by the metasurface, which offers extra control freedom for the microparticles. Additionally, optical sorting technology is proposed based on SPP metasurface, which can sort nano-objects based on their material properties, as shown in Figure d . The metasurface consists of double-lined gold nanostructures, which form a complex plasmonic field for optical sorting.…”

“…(d) Particle sorting based on material properties using a metasurface. Reprinted with permission from ref . Copyright 2021 Wiley-VCH.…”

“…Additionally, optical sorting technology is proposed based on SPP metasurface, which can sort nano-objects based on their material properties, as shown in Figure 11d. 238 The metasur- face consists of double-lined gold nanostructures, which form a complex plasmonic field for optical sorting. As a result, the optical pulling force and pushing force are applied to plasmonic and dielectric objects, respectively, while the chiral object experiences an optical lateral force.…”

Quantum Inspired Broadband Photonic Absorber: Potential Application as Solar Sail along with Mobility Analysis

“…It should also be noted that our force value is in the range of 10 −19 N for single unit cell, which can be seen insignificant to propel our QIMA solar sail. However, the light intensity used is , but we know that force and light intensity has a directly proportional relationship, which implies that our solar sail will show significant force with a higher rate of light intensity [ 77–80 ] during the real world scenarios. Moreover, it can be observed that the force presented for our array structure is “10” times greater.…”

“…, but we know that force and light intensity has a directly proportional relationship, which implies that our solar sail will show significant force with a higher rate of light intensity [77][78][79][80] during the real world scenarios. Moreover, it can be observed that the force presented for our array structure is "10" times greater.…”