PHYS 8990 Topic

Plasmonics and Metamaterials Design and Application

Metamaterials are artificial media composed of engineered sub-wavelength structures, which cause them to have fascinating new electromagnetic properties that are not usually found in nature; this research area is the forefront of modern optics and optical technology. Optically chiral nanostructures have received a considerable amount of attention recently. This is largely due to intriguing phenomena associated with strong optical chirality, including negative refraction, repulsive Casimir forces, unusual spin Hall effects, and super chiral fields. The exciting properties of optically chiral nanostructures open up a wide array of potential applications in a variety of fields such as nanophotonics, biosensing, and nanofabrication, yet fabrication of plasmonic materials with strong optical chirality remains challenging, particularly for those structures operating in the visible regime. This project focus on both experimental and theoretical aspects of metamaterial design:

1. Experimental fabrication and characterization of chiral metamaterials: based on the glancing angle deposition technique and two-dimensional nanostructure template fabrication technique, different chiral nanostructures will be fabricated, and their optical properties, their sensing applications will be explored.
2. Monte Carlo simulation of chiral metamaterial growth and numerical calculation of the optical properties: kinetic Monte Carlo simulation will be conducted to visualize the metamaterial growth mechanism and three dimensional structures, new design will be proposed, and finite difference time domain (FDTD) method will be used to solve Maxwell's equations and predict the optical response.
3. Magneto-plasmonic chiral metamaterials: based on the multilayer glancing angle deposition technique and two-dimensional nanostructure template fabrication technique, magneto-plasmonic chiral metamatreials can be fabricated, and their magneto-optical properties, their sensing applications will be explored.