Alali F., Kim Y.H., Furlani E.P.
University at Buffalo, US
Keywords: chiral materials, metamaterials, negative index materials, optical activity, plasmonics
Metamaterials are artificial materials that are engineered to produce various interesting phenomena such as negative refractivity and sub-diffraction-limit imaging. The majority of metamaterials for THz applications have been fabricated using “top-down” techniques. These methods tend to be limited to the fabrication of 2D planar materials on rigid substrates at low throughput and with high-cost. Here, we discuss a fundamentally different approach to metamaterials that involves the use of chiral polymers. The chirality of a material can be characterized in terms of a chirality parameter. If it is sufficiently large, a bulk negative index can be realized for one of the circular polarization states of the incident field. We present a bottom-up approach for realizing flexible polymer-based metamaterials with enhanced chirality. This is achieved by introducing metallic nanoparticles into a chiral polymer with a plasmon resonance that is tuned to the molecular chiral response of the media and then further patterning the nanocomposite into chiral shapes to obtain a chiral response both at the molecular level and geometrically at a length scale on the order of the wavelength of the incident field. We report on progress towards this end by demonstrating laser-based patterning of novel planar chiral metamaterials.
Journal: TechConnect Briefs
Volume: 2, Nanotechnology 2013: Electronics, Devices, Fabrication, MEMS, Fluidics and Computational (Volume 2)
Published: May 12, 2013
Pages: 64 - 67
Industry sectors: Advanced Materials & Manufacturing | Sensors, MEMS, Electronics
Topics: Nanoelectronics, Photonic Materials & Devices
ISBN: 978-1-4822-0584-8