The functionalities of traditional optical component are mainly based on the phase accumulation through the propagation length, leading to a bulky optical component such as converging lens and waveplate. Metasurfaces composed of planar structures with artificial design have attracted a huge number of interests due to their ability on controlling the electromagnetic phase as well as amplitude at a subwavelength scale. The feasible applications based on metasurfaces include nonlinear dynamics, light beam shaping, quantum interference etc. Beside those promising characteristics, people now intend to discover the field of meta-devices, where we can attain optical properties and functionalities through changing the feature characteristics of metasurfaces in demand. They therefore pave a potential way for the development of flat optical devices and integrated optoelectronic systems and toward the far-reaching applications which are impossible previously. In this talk, four research topics for photonic applications with metasurfaces and meta-devices will be performed and discussed: high efficiency anomalous beam deflector, highly dimensional holographic imaging, versatile polarization control and metadevices with active property.
Increasing the nonlinear optical response at nanometer length scale is a very important issue due to the wide applications in various disciplines such as information science, bio-medicine and quantum computation technology. Second harmonic generation (SHG) arising from the metal nanostructures has provide a very powerful tool in studying the surface and interface properties of these materials. The SHG from various kinds of asymmetric geometric configurations such as V and L shape structures, imperfect nano-spheres, metal/insulator/metal multilayer structures, and planar split ring resonators have been proposed. However, all the previous studies in plasmonic nonlinear optical behavior rely on the enhancement of the electric field and seldom considered the magnetic field effect.
In this work, we present a vertical split ring resonator (SRR) based metamaterial to generate SHG. By adopting such a novel structure, both the electric and magnetic field will be significantly enhanced due to the localized surface plasmon resonance, hence the generation of the second-harmonic and its re-emission into the far field are dramatically increased several orders comparing with that of the planar SRR. We simulated and fabricated the reflective type vertical SRR, and optimized the aspect ratio to maximize the SHG signal. We further systematically studied the nonlinear optical response in the vertical SRR dimers and trimers and found that the gap distance between two SRRs plays a very important role in the SHG intensity. This work paves a new way in increasing the nonlinear transition quantum efficiency and provides a new insight in designing new nonlinear sources.
Metamaterials, with the ability of tailoring optical properties of materials, have been applied to holograms recently, which has shown the priorities of switchable polarization and multicolor image comparing with the conventional holograms. However, the current metasurface based multicolor holograms have suffered the problems of narrow band and low efficiency in phase modulation for gold and silver when their feature dimensions are in few tens of nanometers. Interestingly, aluminum with higher plasma frequency could yield surface plasmon resonance across a broader range of the spectrum ranging from visible to UV. Metasurfaces incorporating with the aluminum offer the unique opportunity to extend the working wavelength to cover the entire visible spectrum for the generation of full color meta-holograms.
Here we demonstrated a phase modulated multicolor meta-hologram that is polarization dependent and capable of producing images in red, green and blue colors. The metahologram is made of aluminum nanorods that are arranged in a two-dimensional array of pixels with surface plasmon resonance in the visible to UV range. The aluminum nanorod array is patterned on a 30 nm thick SIO2 spacer layer sputtered on top of a 130nm thick aluminum mirror. With proper design of the structure, we obtain resonances of narrow bandwidths to allow for implementation of multicolor scheme. Taking into account of the wavelength dependence of the diffraction angle, we can project images to specific locations with predetermined size and order. With tuning of aluminum nanorod size, we demonstrate that the image color can be continuously varied across the visible spectrum.
Upconversion fluorescence from Lanthanide-doped nanocrystals has attracted widespread interests because of its greatly potential applications in various fields, such as photonic crystal lasers, material science, biological therapy, and so on. However, the relatively low quantum yield (typically < 5%) is the major limitation for upconversion nanocrystals. Meanwhile, in addition to the chemical methods, plasmonic structures have been adopted as another strategy to improve the radiation efficiency and control the relaxation process of the upcovnersion nanocrystals. We designed the anti-symmetric split ring resonators with various periods and the fishnet structures. The surface plasmon resonance peaks of the structure shift as the periods varies. For example, in a multi-layered plamsonic metasurface with the period of 250nm, both the electric and magnetic modes could be generated simultaneously when excited by the incident light with proper polarization. This plasmonic structure provides two different channels for the enhancement of upconversion fluorescence. The resonance peak of 650nm is magnetic resonance mode, while the peak of 980nm is electric resonance mode. The resonance peak of 980nm coincides with the absorption band of the Lanthanide-dopoed nanocrystal, and the peak of 650nm matches with its emission band. We found that the upconversion fluorescence intensity could be enhanced more than 10 times when the electric resonance frequency of the metasurface matches with the absorption band of the upconversion nanocrystals, while the magnetic mode overlaps with its emission band. This is due to the local density of optical states was significantly enhanced by the plasmonic metasurface. The detailed results and mechanism will be discussed.
The fact that surface-induced damping rate of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in metal nanoparticles increases with the decrease of particle size is well known. This damping effect introduces additional loss to that of bulk metal and results in smaller enhancement of luminescence. We show that this rate also increases with the degree of the mode confinement, hence damping of the higher order nonradiative SPP modes in spherical particles is greatly enhanced relative to damping of the fundamental (dipole) SPP mode. Since higher order modes are the ones responsible for quenching of luminescence in the vicinity of metal surfaces, the degree of quenching increases resulting in a substantial decrease in the amount of attainable enhancement of the luminescence.
Selective excitation of specific multipolar resonances in matter can be of great utility in understanding the internal make-up of the underlying material and, as a result, in developing novel nanophotonic devices. Many efforts have been addressed on this topic. For example, the emission spectra related to the different multipolar transitions of trivalent europium can be modulated by changing the thickness of the dielectric spacer between the gold mirror and the fluorescent layer. In this talk, we reported the results about active control of the multipolar resonance in metadevices using the coherent control technique. In the coherent control spectroscopy system, the optical standing wave constructed from two counterpart propagation coherent beams is utilized as the excitation. By controlling the time delay between two ultrafast pulses to decide the location of metadivce as the electromagnetic field node or antinode node of standing wave, the absorption related to the specific multipolar resonance can be controlled. Using this technique, with the 30-nm-thick metadevice, the broadband controlling light with light without nonlinearity can be realized. The switching contrast ratios can be as high as 3:1 with a modulation bandwidth in excess of 2 THz. The active control of the high order and complex optical resonance related to the magnetic dipole, electric quadrupole, and toroidal dipole in the metamaterial is reported as well. This research can be applied in the all ultrafast all-optical data processing and the active control of the resonances of metadevice with high order multipolar resonance.
The toroidal dipole moments of natural molecules are hard to be detected so the artificial toroidal materials made by metamaterial attract more attentions. Metamaterial, the sub-wavelength artificial structures, can modulate reflection or transmission of light. The toroidal metamaterial can not only amplify the toroidal moment but also repress the electric and magnetic dipole so it can be used to study the properties of toroidal dipole moment. However, there are many limitations for the experiments, such as the lateral light is necessary to excite the toroidal response. Most of the toroidal dipole moments oscillate perpendicularly to the substrate, therefore it is difficult to couple it with other dipole moments and could be only excited in the microwave region. In this paper, we design a toroidal metamaterial consisting of dumbbell-shaped aperture and vertical split ring resonator (VSRR) vertically. The toroidal dipole moment of our metamaterial is excited in the optical region. The arrangement of our nanostructures is vertical instead of planar annular arrangement to reduce the size of the unit cell and increase the density of the toroidal dipole moment. Moreover, the direction of toroidal dipole moment is parallel to the substrate which can be used for the study of the coupling effect with other kinds of dipolar moments.
KEYWORDS: Optical storage, Data storage, Optical recording, Digital video discs, Optical resolution, Objectives, Atomic force microscopy, Spatial resolution, Nondestructive evaluation, Applied research
Conventional optical data storage such as digital versatile disc (DVD) and Blu-ray disc (BD), provide us inexpensive and compact media for satisfying information storage requirement for decades. As the knowledge and information increase rapidly, the requirement cannot be already satisfied by current data storage systems. As far as we know, the size of recording mark, the critical storage density indicator, depends on recording energy, writing strategies, opto-thermal threshold plane and thermal conductivity. Readout is limited by optical resolution limit, the wavelength of readout laser and numerical aperture (N.A.) of objective lens. In this talk, I will introduce several means to increase the optical storage density. A powerful tool, conductive-tip atomic force microscopy (C-AFM), with the advantages of high spatial resolution, high contrast of conductivity and non-destructive method to help us better understand the formation of recording marks is also presented. Finally, I will show our recent efforts on realizing the extreme of recording mark.
Split-ring resonator (SRR), one kind of building block of metamaterials, attracts wide attentions due to the resonance excitation of electric and magnetic dipolar response. The fundamental plasmonic properties and potential applications in novel three dimensional vertical split-ring resonators (VSRRs) are designed and investigated. The resonant properties arose from the electric and magnetic interactions between the VSRR and light are theoretically and experimentally studied. Tuning the configuration of VSRR unit cells is able to generate various novel coupling phenomena in VSRRs, such as plasmon hybridization and Fano resonance. The magnetic resonance plays a key role in plasmon coupling in VSRRs. The VSRR-based refractive-index sensor is demonstrated. Due to the unique structural configuration, the enhanced plasmon fields localized in VSRR gaps can be lifted off from the dielectric substrate, allowing for the increase of sensing volume and enhancing the sensitivity. We perform a VSRR based metasurface for light manipulation in optical communication frequency. By changing the prong heights, the 2π phase modulation can be achieved in VSRR for the design of metasurface which can be used for high areal density integration of metal nanostructures and optoelectronic devices.
Toroidal dipole moments, the third kind of fundamental dipole moment, have unusual electromagnetic properties
different from the electric and magnetic multipoles. We fabricate a new type of 3D plasmonic toroidal metamaterial by
using mutual coupling between dumbbell-shaped gold apertures with vertical split-ring resonators (VSRRs) at optical
frequency. The radiated power of multipole moments are calculated and analyzed to improve the meta-system is
dominated by the toroidal dipole moment. This result paves a way for practical application on metamaterial based
devices, such as biosensor and lasing spaser.
KEYWORDS: Particles, Plasmonics, Near field optics, Optical tweezers, Optical spheres, Surface plasmons, Dielectrics, Plasmons, Optical manipulation, Near field
Optical manipulation of small particles has long been challenging mainly due to reduced gradient force. Rotation of particles by light is even more difficult since that requires the particle to be absorbing or to exhibit large polarizability and optical anisotropy. Otherwise, the optical field has to carry orbital angular momentum. Recently surface-plasmonenhanced optical near field has been used to effectively trap small particles. However, rotation and spinning of isotropic dielectric particles by light has not been demonstrated, not to mention a single device capable of multiple functions. Here, we report the first demonstration of selective trapping or rotation of isotropic dielectric micro-particles using one single plasmonic device, a plasmonic Archimedes spiral. Such functionality is of great interest and may find applications in various fields, such as protein folding analysis and local mixing in microfluidic channels.
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