Rongkuo Zhao

Chiral metamaterials: retrieval of the effective parameters with and without substrate

After the prediction that strong enough optical activity may result in negative refraction and negative reflection, more and more artificial chiral metamaterials were designed and fabricated at difference frequency ranges from microwaves to optical waves. Therefore, a simple and robust method to retrieve the effective constitutive parameters for chiral metamaterials is urgently needed. Here, we analyze the wave propagation in chiral metamaterials and follow the regular retrieval procedure for ordinary metamaterials and apply it in chiral metamaterial slabs. Then based on the transfer matrix technique, the parameter retrieval is extended to treat samples with not only the substrate but also the top layers. After the parameter retrieval procedure, we take two examples to check our method and study how the substrate influences on the thin chiral metamaterials slabs. We find that the substrate may cause the homogeneous slab to be inhomogeneous, i.e. the reflections in forward and backward directions are different. However, the chiral metamaterial where the resonance element is embedded far away from the substrate is insensitive to the substrate.

Repulsive Casimir Force in Chiral Metamaterials

We demonstrate theoretically that one can obtain repulsive Casimir forces and stable nanolevitations by using chiral metamaterials. By extending the Lifshitz theory to treat chiral metamaterials, we find that a repulsive force and a minimum of the interaction energy possibly exist for strong chirality, under realistic frequency dependencies and correct limiting values (for zero and infinite frequencies) of the permittivity, permeability, and chiral coefficients.

Optical forces in nanowire pairs and metamaterials

We study the optical force arising when isolated gold nanowire pairs and metamaterials with a gold nanowire pair in the unit cell are illuminated with laser radiation. Firstly, we show that isolated nanowire pairs are subject to much stronger optical forces than nanospheres due to their stronger electric and magnetic dipole resonances. We also investigate the properties of the optical force as a function of the length of the nanowires and of the distance between the nanowires. Secondly, we study the optical force in a metamaterial that consists of a periodic array of nanowire pairs. We show that the ratio of the size of the unit cell to the length of the nanowires determines whether the electric dipole resonance leads to an attractive or a repulsive force, and we present the underlying physical mechanism for this effect.

Transforming the optical landscape

Electromagnetism provides us with some of the most powerful tools in science, encompassing lasers, optical microscopes, magnetic resonance imaging scanners, radar, and a host of other techniques. To understand and develop the technology requires more than a set of formal equations. Scientists and engineers have to form a vivid picture that fires their imaginations and enables intuition to play a full role in the process of invention. It is to this end that transformation optics has been developed, exploiting Faraday’s picture of electric and magnetic fields as lines of force, which can be manipulated by the electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability of surrounding materials. Transformation optics says what has to be done to place the lines of force where we want them to be.

Flexible chiral metamaterials in the terahertz regime: a comparative study of various designs

Five different chiral metamaterials in the terahertz (THz) regime, fabricated on fully flexible polyimide substrates, are comparatively studied via numerical calculations and experimental measurements. The chiral properties of these metamaterials, which are discussed based on their optical activity, circular dichroism, and the retrieved effective parameters, show pronounced pure optical activity (larger than 300°/wavelength), as well as important circular polarization generation and filtering capabilities. Negative refractive index is also obtained for all the considered designs.

Harvesting light with transformation optics

Transformation optics (TO) is a new tool for controlling electromagnetic fields. In the context of metamaterial technology, it provides a direct link between a desired electromagnetic (EM) phenomenon and the material response required for its occurrence. Recently, this powerful framework has been successfully exploited to study surface plasmon assisted phenomena such as light harvesting. Here, we review the general strategy based on TO to design plasmonic devices capable of harvesting light over a broadband spectrum and achieving considerable field confinement and enhancement. The methodology starts with two-dimensional (2D) cases, such as 2D metal edges, crescent-shaped cylinders, nanowire dimers, and rough metal surfaces, and is well extended to fully-fledged three-dimensional (3D) situations. The largely analytic approach gives physical insights into the processes involved and suggests a way forward to study a wide variety of plasmonic nanostructures.

Optically controllable THz chiral metamaterials

Switchable and tunable chiral metamaterial response is numerically demonstrated here in different uniaxial chiral metamaterial structures operating in the THz regime. The structures are based on the bi-layer conductor design and the tunable/switchable response is achieved by replacing parts of the metallic components of the structures by photoconducting Si, which can be transformed from an insulating to an almost conducting state through photoexcitation, achievable under external optical pumping. All the structures proposed and discussed here exhibit frequency regions with giant tunable circular dichroism, as well as regions with giant tunable optical activity, showing unique potential in the achievement of active THz polarization components, like tunable polarizers and polarization filters.

van der Waals interactions at the nanoscale: The effects of nonlocality

Significance The van der Waals interaction is a ubiquitous but subtle force between particles mediated by quantum fluctuations of charge. It is the most long-range force acting between particles and influences a range of phenomena such as surface adhesion, friction, and colloid stability. Calculations of the force between parallel surfaces >10 nm apart is a simple task, but when the geometry is more complex, e.g., a pair of nanospheres <5 nm apart, the task is more difficult. Furthermore a macroscopic description of the dielectric properties no longer suffices, and we must consider the diffuse nonlocal nature of the electron polarization cloud. In this paper, we propose a simple analytic treatment of the problem. Calculated using classical electromagnetism, the van der Waals force increases without limit as two surfaces approach. In reality, the force saturates because the electrons cannot respond to fields of very short wavelength: polarization charges are always smeared out to some degree and in consequence the response is nonlocal. Nonlocality also plays an important role in the optical spectrum and distribution of the modes but introduces complexity into calculations, hindering an analytical solution for interactions at the nanometer scale. Here, taking as an example the case of two touching nanospheres, we show for the first time, to our knowledge, that nonlocality in 3D plasmonic systems can be accurately analyzed using the transformation optics approach. The effects of nonlocality are found to dramatically weaken the field enhancement between the spheres and hence the van der Waals interaction and to modify the spectral shifts of plasmon modes.

Rotational quantum friction.

We investigate the frictional forces due to quantum fluctuations acting on a small sphere rotating near a surface. At zero temperature, we find the frictional force near a surface to be several orders of magnitude larger than that for the sphere rotating in vacuum. For metallic materials with typical conductivity, quantum friction is maximized by matching the frequency of rotation with the conductivity. Materials with poor conductivity are favored to obtain large quantum frictions. For semiconductor materials that are able to support surface plasmon polaritons, quantum friction can be further enhanced by several orders of magnitude due to the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons.

Microstructure effects for Casimir forces in chiral metamaterials

We examine a recent prediction for the chirality dependence of the Casimir force in chiral metamaterials by numerical computation of the forces between the exact microstructures, rather than homogeneous approximations. Although repulsion in the metamaterial regime is rigorously impossible, it is unknown whether a reduction in the attractive force can be achieved through suitable material engineering. We compute the exact force for a chiral bent-cross pattern, as well as forces for an idealized “omega”-particle medium in the dilute approximation and identify the effects of structural inhomogeneity i.e., proximity forces and anisotropy .W e find that these microstructure effects dominate the force for separations where chirality was predicted to have a strong influence. At separations where the homogeneous approximation is valid, in even the most ideal circumstances the effects of chirality are less than 10 �4 of the total force, making them virtually undetectable in experiments.