CFN Colloquium

In 2000, the demonstration of an artificially structured metamaterial with simultaneously negative permittivity and permeability—or a negative index metamaterial—stimulated widespread interest both in the fundamental properties of metamaterials as well as those of plasmonic materials. This interest has had an impact on virtually every aspect of optics and photonics research and technology. Nanostructured materials have the potential for unique and unprecedent photonic devices relevant to applications such as sensing, imaging, information storage and retrieval, processing, and many more. Our group has focused on several metasurface platforms as a means of investigating and demonstrating key concepts. While structuring of a surface or volume provides an important means of controlling the propagation of light with tremendous precision, the use of plasmonic nanostructures provides the means of actually interacting with the radiative dynamics of emitters and other sources, modifying density of states; enhancing or suppressing stimulated and spontaneous emission; modifying nonlinear scattering and harmonic generation; and so forth. The combination of tools available with metamaterials, metasurfaces and plasmonic materials—while still not yet fully exploited—lead to the opportunity for new inventive photonic devices with improved and flexible performance metrics. In this talk, I will describe our group's efforts in the areas of holographic metamaterials, and the need to go beyond holography for multifunctional optical devices. I will also describe the film-coupled nanoparticle platform we have developed over the years and discuss the capability of field enhancement in nanogaps to impact diverse applications such as lasing; ultrafast and ultrabright light sources; light absorbing surfaces; and controlled emission surfaces.