Visible Dynamic organic Optical Metasurfaces

Introduction

Optical nanoantennas are nanoscale objects that act as antennas for light. They can provide local and abrupt optical phase shifts, which has led to an emerging type of flat ultrathin optical components called metasurfaces. The concept of metasurfaces has enabled many important applications, including ultrathin flat lenses and high-performance OLEDs.

Applications of Metasurfaces

In addition to their attractive form factor, metasurfaces push the limits of what is achievable in terms of light-matter interactions. This is exemplified by demonstrations of intriguing phenomena such as:

• Invisibility cloaking
• Anomalous refraction
• The photonic spin Hall effect

Limitations of Traditional Metasurfaces

However, a major limitation of traditional metasurfaces is that they are static, meaning we cannot tune their functions after they have been produced. The reason for this is that traditional nanoantennas are made from materials with fixed material properties, such as gold, silver, or titanium dioxide.

It has proven highly challenging to make nanoantennas that can be dynamically tuned, particularly for the visible spectral range and by electrical stimuli. My group recently introduced conducting polymers as a new organic materials platform for tunable plasmonic nanoantennas and metasurfaces, but those systems are still restricted to wavelengths outside the visible range.

Project Goals

In VisDOM, I will develop and study a new type of electrically tunable optical nanoantennas for visible light. While benefiting from our recent achievements on dynamic nanoantennas, the proposed nanoantennas will be based on a conceptually new idea and mechanism, forming an ambitious project that goes well beyond the state of the art.

The important goal of VisDOM is to contribute a new type of dynamic organic nanooptics and electrically tunable optical metasurfaces for visible light.