New trends in nanophotonics

Abstract

Nanophotonics considers the complex interactions between light and matter at the sub-wavelength scale. Recent progress in nanophotonics has revealed unprecedented optical phenomena, which have opened up the novel and rapidly developing fields of metamaterials, photonic crystals, and plasmonics. The last few decades have seen explosive growth in this field, from fundamental research to applications including condensed-matter physics, quantum photonics, near-field/far-field optics, biochemical sensing, deep learning for nanophotonic design, and nanofabrication/ nanomanufacturing. The International Conference on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals, and Plasmonics (META) is an annual conference of researchers in metamaterials, nanophotonics, and other closely related topics. It covers a broad range of topics including, but not limited to, metasurfaces, meta-devices, topological effects in optics, two-dimensional materials, light-matter interaction in nano-cavities, plasmonic circuits, thermal engineering, and quantum photonic systems. The latest conference, META'19, was held in Lisbon, Portugal (July 23-26, 2019), where the latest trends and recent progress in nanophotonics were discussed to provide further insights for researchers. This special issue introduces a selection of cutting-edge original research and review papers from the conference. Metasurfaces can manipulate the optical properties of light with the ultrathin materials. Two groups review this topic in detail in this issue. Wei et al. [1] focus on the recent research progress in metasurfaces for holographic displays, polarization conversion, active modulation, and linear and nonlinear modulation; the authors discuss in detail the working principle and advantages of metasurfaces and provide many specific applications. Intaravanne and Chen [2] review the recent progress on metasurfaces, mainly focusing on metasurface devices for polarization detection and polarization profiles. The review also presents various applications of metasurface-based devices by manipulating arbitrary polarizations, with specific examples for high-resolution images, quick-response codes, color images, and holograms. Other topics on metasurfaces deal with the unique metasurface-driven optical properties, presented by three groups. Mun et al. [3] report a method to modulate the phase information of a Fano-resonant metasurface; they present an optical de-multiplexer that covers a broad wavelength range in the near-infrared region, and experimentally verify the extremely small full width at half-maximum. The proposed design approach can provide complete control of Fanoresonant metasurfaces for various applications including optical multiplexers, filters, and switches. Park et al. [4] present a metasurface deflector that can control the direction of emission of colloidal quantum dots; the design of metasurfaces was adapted from the optical Yagi-Uda nanoantenna, and the deflection efficiency of the device reaches up to 70%. The developed metasurface facilitates the integration of metasurfa...

Active Property–Structure Integrated Reconfiguration of Individual Resonant Nanoparticles

“…Light has emerged as a promising field in technology and engineering, with modern nanophotonics being stimulated and inspired by a multitude of applications from biochemistry to information technology . Particularly, nanoparticles (NPs) with resonances offer additional flexibility for effectively modulating light at the nanoscale due to their unique advantages in nanoscale scattering.…”

Geometric and physical configurations of meta‐atoms for advanced metasurface holography

“…The electromagnetic and optical responses of metamaterials are determined by the geometric and intrinsic properties of the constituent meta‐atoms. Many design approaches 8–11 and fabrication methods 12–17 have been investigated. For example, chiral metamaterials, consisting of meta‐atoms lacking any mirror symmetry planes, can selectively absorb left or right circularly polarized light (LCP and RCP, respectively) 18–26 .…”

Concurrent Optimization of Diffraction Fields from Binary Phase Mask for Three-Dimensional Nanopatterning

“…Introducing an optimization algorithm and new figure of merit (FOM) overcomes the limitation of the intuition-based single variable sweep method. 19 It can achieve high-contrast 3D nanopatterning, which paves the way for flexible construction of phase masks to produce nontrivial geometry of nanostructures.…”

“…We concluded that maximizing the electric field contrast derives more apparent contrast in 3D nanostructures, instead of suppressing the zeroth interference beam through a series of calculations. Introducing an optimization algorithm and new figure of merit (FOM) overcomes the limitation of the intuition-based single variable sweep method . It can achieve high-contrast 3D nanopatterning, which paves the way for flexible construction of phase masks to produce nontrivial geometry of nanostructures.…”