Visible Dynamic organic Optical Metasurfaces

Projektbeschreibung

Art und Weise, wie wir Licht manipulieren und kontrollieren, revolutionieren

Herkömmliche optische Metaoberflächen sind durch feste Funktionen und mangelnde Dynamik eingeschränkt. Es besteht ein besonderer Bedarf an der Entwicklung neuartiger dynamischer Metaoberflächen für sichtbares Licht, die ein erweitertes Spektrum an Anwendungen fördern. In diesem Zusammenhang wird das vom Europäischen Forschungsrat finanzierte Projekt VisDOM eine neue Art von elektrisch abstimmbarer optischer Nanoantenne für sichtbares Licht entwickeln. Aufbauend auf den jüngsten Errungenschaften bei dynamischen Nanoantennen unter Verwendung leitender Polymere wird das Projekt einen Schritt weitergehen, indem es eine konzeptionell neue Idee und einen neuen Mechanismus einführt. Ziel ist es, einen Beitrag zur Nano-Optik zu leisten, indem eine neue Klasse organischer dynamischer Nanostrukturen geschaffen wird, die abstimmbare Metaoberflächen für sichtbares Licht begünstigen.

Ziel

Optical nanoantennas are nanoscale objects that acts 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. In addition to their attractive form factor, metasurfaces pushes the limits of what is achievable in terms of light-matter interactions, exemplified by demonstrations of intriguing phenomena like invisibility cloaking, anomalous refraction and the photonic spin Hall effect.

However, a major limitation of traditional metasurfaces is that they are static, in the sense that we cannot tune their functions after they have been produced. The reason 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 and particularly for the visible spectral range and by electrical stimuli. My group recently introduced conducting polymers as a new organic materials platform for tuneable plasmonic nanoantennas and metasurfaces, but those systems are still restricted to wavelengths outside the visible range.

In VisDOM, I will develop and study a new type of electrically tuneable optical nanoantennas for visible light. While benefitting 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 state of the art. The important goal of VisDOM is to contribute with a new type of dynamic organic nanooptics and electrically tuneable optical metasurfaces for visible light.