July 2020
Spotlight Summary by Johann Toudert
Optical materials for maximal nanophotonic response [Invited]
Thanks to their subwavelength dimensions, nanostructures are able to strongly interact with light in selected spectral regions in the ultraviolet, visible or infrared. This is appealing for applications that require a strong confinement, absorption, or scattering of light in one of these spectral regions, such as solar energy harvesting, sensing, enhanced Raman spectroscopy or metasurface optics. To achieve strong interaction in the spectral region required, the nanostructures first have to be built from a suitable material. Therefore, over the past years, a wide gamut of materials (metals, semimetals, semiconductors, insulators) has been explored for the design of nanostructures with optimal optical properties. Exactly evaluating and optimizing the performance of such nanostructures requires wave optics calculations. However, this resource-consuming method can be replaced by simpler approaches based on the calculation of analytical figures of merit, whenever one wishes to determine the best performing material for achieving a given optical effect in a given spectral region. In this context, the review paper from Hyungki Shim and coworkers provides a selection of such analytical figures of merit, which they have used to benchmark the performance of some of the highest-interest materials underneath the two main classes of resonant nanostructures: polaritonic and high-index materials.
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Article Information
Optical materials for maximal nanophotonic response [Invited]
Hyungki Shim, Zeyu Kuang, and Owen D. Miller
Opt. Mater. Express 10(7) 1561-1585 (2020) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF