Advanced photonic materials

Key personnel: Dr Stavroula Foteinopoulou

Examples of “meta-atoms” of photonic materials functional at the visible spectrum.

Light refracts negatively, i.e., at the “wrong” side, at the interface of a photonic crystal metamaterial

Current and emerging photonics technologies call for controlled spatial and temporal light manipulation over a wide spectral range, from THz to visible/UV frequencies. Thus, modern photonics urge us to go beyond natural bulk materials and engineer micro/nano-structured material composites with extraordinary electromagnetic (EM) responses.

Such exotic manmade structures owe their curious properties both to the materials of the constituents comprising their elementary building block and to the specific spatial arrangement of such building blocks. The feature size of these artificial “meta-atoms” dictates the operational frequency range for the photonic composite material. For example, structures with feature size in the cm range will be functional at microwaves while typical structures functional in the visible regime should have nm scale features. Examples of unconventional EM behaviors in such advanced photonic materials include isotropic negative refraction, slow light, near-field enhancement with controlled polarization, as well as EM focusing and energy transfer that beats the diffraction limit. Thus, composite structured materials based on dielectrics or metals, are a rich garden for novel electromagnetism and light manipulation capabilities.

Our research focuses on the design, theory and modeling of prototype man-made structures which can tame light in a unique manner. The objectives of these studies are to make contributions which can lead to the advancement of optical computing, next generation light sources and energy conversion systems, optical based chemical/biological sensing platforms, as well as in imaging and microscopy.