Controlled reflectance surfaces with film-coupled colloidal nanoantennas

By A. Moreau, C. Ciracì, J. Mock, R. T. Hill, Qiang Wang, Benjamin J. Wiley, A. Chilkoti, David R. Smith. Nature, 2012

693 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Efficient and tunable absorption is essential for a variety of applications, such as designing controlled-emissivity surfaces for thermophotovoltaic devices, tailoring an infrared spectrum for controlled thermal dissipation and producing detector elements for imaging. Metamaterials based on metallic elements are particularly efficient as absorbing media, because both the electrical and the magnetic properties of a metamaterial can be tuned by structured design. So far, metamaterial absorbers in the infrared or visible range have been fabricated using lithographically patterned metallic structures, making them inherently difficult to produce over large areas and hence reducing their applicability. Here we demonstrate a simple method to create a metamaterial absorber by randomly adsorbing chemically synthesized silver nanocubes onto a nanoscale-thick polymer spacer layer on a gold film, making no effort to control the spatial arrangement of the cubes on the film. We show that the film-coupled nanocubes provide a reflectance spectrum that can be tailored by varying the geometry (the size of the cubes and/or the thickness of the spacer). Each nanocube is the optical analogue of a grounded patch antenna, with a nearly identical local field structure that is modified by the plasmonic response of the metal’s dielectric function, and with an anomalously large absorption efficiency that can be partly attributed to an interferometric effect. The absorptivity of large surface areas can be controlled using this method, at scales out of reach of lithographic approaches (such as electron-beam lithography) that are otherwise required to manipulate matter on the nanoscale.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Structural Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9cd337b34385685594b2446b70440111de6fe82

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

In Civil and Structural Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

A review of gap-surface plasmon metasurfaces: fundamentals and applications (2018, background): “However, unlike reflective GSPMs, GSP absorbers usually require a much thinner dielectric spacer to ensure strong interactions between the top nanoparticles and the bottom reflector, forming a closely coupled antisymmetric current distribution [40, 41].”
Plasmonic materials for energy: From physics to applications (2013, methodology): “s commonly used to achieve spectrallyselective SP-mediated absorption include: shape and size tuning of individual nanoparticles [77], impedance matching in ordered [78, 79] and random nanostructures [80], Wood anomalies in the scattering from periodic gratings [81, 82, 83]. Broadband spectral respo”
Thin perfect absorbers for electromagnetic waves: Theory, design, and realizations (2015, background): “[114,115,127]) is the same as for the case of resonant plasmonic arrays.”