Realization of an all-dielectric zero-index optical metamaterial

By P. Moitra, Yuanmu Yang, Zachary Anderson, I. Kravchenko, Dayrl P. Briggs, J. Valentine. Nature Photonics, 2013

636 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Metamaterials offer unprecedented flexibility for manipulating the optical properties of matter, including the ability to access negative index1,2,3,4, ultrahigh index5 and chiral optical properties6,7,8. Recently, metamaterials with near-zero refractive index have attracted much attention9,10,11,12,13. Light inside such materials experiences no spatial phase change and extremely large phase velocity, properties that can be applied for realizing directional emission14,15,16, tunnelling waveguides17, large-area single-mode devices18 and electromagnetic cloaks19. However, at optical frequencies, the previously demonstrated zero- or negative-refractive-index metamaterials have required the use of metallic inclusions, leading to large ohmic loss, a serious impediment to device applications20,21. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an impedance-matched zero-index metamaterial at optical frequencies based on purely dielectric constituents. Formed from stacked silicon-rod unit cells, the metamaterial has a nearly isotropic low-index response for transverse-magnetic polarized light, leading to angular selectivity of transmission and directive emission from quantum dots placed within the material. Previously demonstrated zero- or negative-refractive-index metamaterials at optical frequencies suffer from large ohmic losses because of the need to use metals. Metamaterials formed by stacked silicon rod unit cells allow the realization of all-dielectric impedance-matched zero-index metamaterials operating at optical frequencies, potentially benefiting the development of angular-selective optical devices.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4adbb4bb03ef203896f6d3618114995fa926f85

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Citations in the corpus

Topological photonics (2018, background): “Dirac cones can also be used to tailor the dispersion of photonic structures, even producing “epsilon-near-zero” materials (Huang et al., 2011; Moitra et al., 2013).”
Optically resonant dielectric nanostructures (2016, background): “Therefore, 3D periodic structures composed of such nanoparticles should demonstrate the properties of photonic crystals and are not suitable for the homogenization of parameters (69), with the exception of zero-index materials (70).”