Jongbum Kim

Oxides and nitrides as alternative plasmonic materials in the optical range [Invited]

As alternatives to conventional metals, new plasmonic materials offer many advantages in the rapidly growing fields of plasmonics and metamaterials. These advantages include low intrinsic loss, semiconductor-based design, compatibility with standard nanofabrication processes, tunability, and others. Transparent conducting oxides such as Al:ZnO, Ga:ZnO and indium-tin-oxide (ITO) enable many high-performance metamaterial devices operating in the near-IR. Transition-metal nitrides such as TiN or ZrN can be substitutes for conventional metals in the visible frequencies. In this paper we provide the details of fabrication and characterization of these new materials and discuss their suitability for a number of metamaterial and plasmonic applications.

Improving the radiative decay rate for dye molecules with hyperbolic metamaterials

We directly demonstrate an improvement in the radiative decay rate of dye molecules near multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs). Our comprehensive study shows a radiative decay rate for rhodamine 800 (Rh800) that is several times higher due to the use of HMM samples as compared to dielectric substrates. This is also the first experimental demonstration that multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials provide an increase in the radiative decay rate relative to those from either thin or thick gold films.

Plasmonic Resonances in Nanostructured Transparent Conducting Oxide Films

Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) are emerging as possible alternative constituent materials to replace noble metals such as silver and gold for low-loss plasmonic and metamaterial (MM) applications in the near infrared regime (NIR). The optical characteristics of TCOs have been studied to evaluate the functionalities and potential of these materials as metal substitutes in plasmonic and MM devices, even apart from their usual use as electrode materials. However, patterning TCOs at the nanoscale, which is necessary for plasmonic and MM devices, is not well studied. This paper investigates nanopatterning processes for TCOs, especially the liftoff technique with electron-beam lithography, and the realization of plasmonic nanostructures with TCOs. By employing the developed nanopatterning process, we fabricate 2-D-periodic arrays of TCO nanodisks and characterize the materials plasmonic properties to evaluate the performance of TCOs as metal substitutes. Light-induced collective oscillations of the free electrons in the TCOs (bulk plasmons) and localized surface plasmon resonances are observed in the wavelength range from 1.6 to 2.1 μm. Well-defined resonance peaks are observed, which can be dramatically tuned by varying the amount of dopant and by thermally annealing the TCO nanodisks in nitrogen gas ambient while maintaining the low-loss properties.

Roadmap on optical metamaterials

Optical metamaterials have redefined how we understand light in notable ways: from strong response to optical magnetic fields, negative refraction, fast and slow light propagation in zero index and trapping structures, to flat, thin and perfect lenses. Many rules of thumb regarding optics, such as mu = 1, now have an exception, and basic formulas, such as the Fresnel equations, have been expanded. The field of metamaterials has developed strongly over the past two decades. Leveraging structured materials systems to generate tailored response to a stimulus, it has grown to encompass research in optics, electromagnetics, acoustics and, increasingly, novel hybrid materials responses. This roadmap is an effort to present emerging fronts in areas of optical metamaterials that could contribute and apply to other research communities. By anchoring each contribution in current work and prospectively discussing future potential and directions, the authors are translating the work of the field in selected areas to a wider community and offering an incentive for outside researchers to engage our community where solid links do not already exist.

Role of epsilon-near-zero substrates in the optical response of plasmonic antennas

Radiation patterns and the resonance wavelength of a plasmonic antenna are significantly influenced by its local environment, particularly its substrate. Here, we experimentally explore the role of dispersive substrates, such as aluminum- or gallium-doped zinc oxide in the near infrared and 4H-silicon carbide in the mid-infrared, upon Au plasmonic antennas, extending from dielectric to metal-like regimes, crossing through epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) conditions. We demonstrate that the vanishing index of refraction within this transition induces a “slowing down” of the rate of spectral shift for the antenna resonance frequency, resulting in an eventual “pinning” of the resonance near the ENZ frequency. This condition corresponds to a strong backward emission with near-constant phase. By comparing heavily doped semiconductors and undoped, polar dielectric substrates with ENZ conditions in the near- and mid-infrared, respectively, we also demonstrate the generality of the phenomenon using both surface plasmon and phonon polaritons, respectively. Furthermore, we also show that the redirected antenna radiation induces a Fano-like interference and an apparent stimulation of optic phonons within SiC.

Ultrabroadband terahertz conductivity of highly doped ZnO and ITO

The broadband complex conductivities of transparent conducting oxides (TCO), namely aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO), gallium-doped zinc oxide (GZO) and tin-doped indium oxide (ITO), were investigated by terahertz time domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) in the frequency range from 0.5 to 18 THz using air plasma techniques, supplemented by the photoconductive antenna (PCA) method. The complex conductivities were accurately calculated using a thin film extraction algorithm and analyzed in terms of the Drude conductivity model. All the measured TCOs have a scattering time below 15 fs. We find that a phonon response must be included in the description of the broadband properties of AZO and GZO for an accurate extraction of the scattering time in these materials, which is strongly influenced by the zinc oxide phonon resonance tail even in the low frequency part of the spectrum. The conductivity of AZO is found to be more thickness dependent than GZO and ITO, indicating high importance of the surface states for electron dynamics in AZO. Finally, we measure the transmittance of the TCO films from 10 to 200 THz with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) measurements, thus closing the gap between THz-TDS measurements (0.5-18 THz) and ellipsometry measurements (200-1000 THz).

Controlling the Polarization State of Light with Plasmonic Metal Oxide Metasurface

Conventional plasmonic materials, namely, noble metals, hamper the realization of practical plasmonic devices due to their intrinsic limitations, such as lack of capabilities to tune in real-time their optical properties, failure to assimilate with CMOS standards, and severe degradation at increased temperatures. Transparent conducting oxide (TCO) is a promising alternative plasmonic material throughout the near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. In addition to compatibility with established silicon-based fabrication procedures, TCOs provide great flexibility in the design and optimization of plasmonic devices because their intrinsic optical properties can be tailored and dynamically tuned. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate metal oxide metasurfaces operating as quarter-waveplates (QWPs) over a broad near-infrared (NIR) range from 1.75 to 2.5 μm. We employ zinc oxide highly doped with gallium (Ga:ZnO) as the plasmonic constituent material of the metasurfaces and fabricate arrays of orthogonal nanorod pairs. Our Ga:ZnO metasurfaces provide a high degree of circular polarization across a broad range of two distinct optical bands in the NIR. Flexible broad-band tunability of the QWP metasurfaces is achieved by the significant shifts of their optical bands and without any degradation in their performance after a post-annealing process up to 450 °C.

Controlling hybrid nonlinearities in transparent conducting oxides via two-colour excitation

Nanophotonics and metamaterials have revolutionized the way we think about optical space (ε,μ), enabling us to engineer the refractive index almost at will, to confine light to the smallest of the volumes, and to manipulate optical signals with extremely small footprints and energy requirements. Significant efforts are now devoted to finding suitable materials and strategies for the dynamic control of the optical properties. Transparent conductive oxides exhibit large ultrafast nonlinearities under both interband and intraband excitations. Here we show that combining these two effects in aluminium-doped zinc oxide via a two-colour laser field discloses new material functionalities. Owing to the independence of the two nonlinearities, the ultrafast temporal dynamics of the material permittivity can be designed by acting on the amplitude and delay of the two fields. We demonstrate the potential applications of this novel degree of freedom by dynamically addressing the modulation bandwidth and optical spectral tuning of a probe optical pulse.

Plasmonics and metamaterials: looking beyond gold and silver

Conventional plasmonic devices have always used silver and gold as metallic components. Other areas of research such as metamaterials and transformation optics that rely on the plasmonic properties of materials also use noble metals as their metallic building blocks. However, these metals are not well-suited for many of the proposed device applications in the optical frequencies because of various problems, including large losses and nanofabrication issues. We show that alternative plasmonic materials such as transparent conducting oxides and transition metal nitrides overcome many of these challenges for metamaterial and plasmonic applications in the near-infrared and visible ranges.

Ultrathin and multicolour optical cavities with embedded metasurfaces

Over the past years, photonic metasurfaces have demonstrated their remarkable and diverse capabilities in advanced control over light propagation. Here, we demonstrate that these artificial films of deeply subwavelength thickness also offer new unparalleled capabilities in decreasing the overall dimensions of integrated optical systems. We propose an original approach of embedding a metasurface inside an optical cavity—one of the most fundamental optical elements—to drastically scale-down its thickness. By modifying the Fabry–Pérot interferometric principle, this methodology is shown to reduce the metasurface-based nanocavity thickness below the conventional λ/(2n) minimum. In addition, the nanocavities with embedded metasurfaces can support independently tunable resonances at multiple bands. As a proof-of-concept, using nanostructured metasurfaces within 100-nm nanocavities, we experimentally demonstrate high spatial resolution colour filtering and spectral imaging. The proposed approach can be extrapolated to compact integrated optical systems on-a-chip such as VCSEL’s, high-resolution spatial light modulators, imaging spectroscopy systems, and bio-sensors.Achieving miniature and versatile nanophotonic devices with metasurfaces is of great interest. The authors embed a metasurface inside an optical cavity to reduce thickness and provide degrees of freedom for controlling resonant wavelengths, enabling multi-band filtering, structural colouration and spectral imaging.