The interaction of a material with light is intimately related to its wavelength-scale structure. Simple connections between structure and optical response empower us with essential intuition to engineer complex optical functionalities. Here we develop local self-uniformity (LSU) as a measure of a random network's internal structural similarity, ranking networks on a continuous scale from crystalline, through glassy intermediate states, to chaotic configurations. We demonstrate that complete photonic bandgap structures possess substantial LSU and validate LSU's importance in gap formation through design of amorphous gyroid structures. Amorphous gyroid samples are fabricated via three-dimensional ceramic printing and the bandgaps experimentally verified. We explore also the wing-scale structuring in the butterfly Pseudolycaena marsyas and show that it possesses substantial amorphous gyroid character, demonstrating the subtle order achieved by evolutionary optimization and the possibility of an amorphous gyroid's self-assembly.
Hyperuniform geometries feature correlated disordered topologies which follow from a tailored k-space design. Here we study gold plasmonic hyperuniform metasurfaces and we report evidence of the effectiveness of k-space engineering on both light scattering and light emission experiments. The metasurfaces possess interesting directional emission properties which are revealed by momentum spectroscopy as diffraction and fluorescence emission rings at size-specific k-vectors. The opening of these rotational-symmetric patterns scales with the hyperuniform correlation length parameter as predicted via the spectral function method.Coherent control of optical waves by scattering from 2D nanostructured surfaces is revolutionising the way we shape the wavefront of an incoming light beam, opening new avenues for miniaturised optical components for integrated optical circuits [1], flat display technology [2], and energy harvesting [3,4]. Metallic surfaces are in particular attractive due to the strong light-matter interaction associated with surface plasmons, enabling diffraction control through plasmonic crystals [5, 6] and metal nano-particle arrays [7,8], broadband operation and increase of the plasmon mode density [9], enhanced omnidirectional light extraction and coupling [10], broadband absorption [11], fluorescence enhancement [12] and lasing [13,14], and more recently the realisation of ultra thin lenses [15] and metasurface holograms [16].Whereas periodic geometries suffer from limited rotational symmetries, aperiodic and disordered topologies, with their richer symmetries and patterns, can lead to superior optical functionalities [8], as in omnidirectional absorption for solar applications [17,18], scattering-induced light localisation [19] and light extraction from LED/OLED [20]. Moreover, disordered metasurfaces are expected to be more resilient against fabrication imperfection and therefore more apt for technological implementation. Given the vast possible designs of non-periodic topologies, ranging from random to correlated-disordered, their full potential is still to be fully explored.There exists a general class of disordered systems, called hyperuniform disordered (HuD) photonic structures, which are of particular interest because they exhibit wide and isotropic photonic band gaps [21], rotational symmetry and broadband k-space control, and can be systematically generated through a specific design rule via universal tessellation protocol [22,23]. Pioneering experiments on photonic HuD systems have explored IR light diffraction in 3D dielectric structures [24], microwave band-gaps formation [25], polarization filtering [26] and random quantum cascade lasers [27]. Theoretical proposals have been put forward for surface enhanced Raman scattering [28], transparency design [29], high-Q optical cavities and low-loss waveguides [30-32], and microwave photonic circuits [25]. HuD structures fabrication is improving quickly, reaching already the IR range [24] but not yet the visible.Here, we report visible light scatt...
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