Visible Dynamic organic Optical Metasurfaces

Project Information

VisDOM

Grant agreement ID: 101086683

DOI

10.3030/101086683

EC signature date 26 February 2023

Start date 1 November 2023

End date 31 October 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 972 876,00

EU contribution

€ 2 972 876,00

Coordinated by

LINKOPINGS UNIVERSITET
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VisDOM (Visible Dynamic organic Optical Metasurfaces)

Reporting period: 2023-11-01 to 2026-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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. This project, VisDOM, is developing electrically tuneable optical nanoantennas for visible light, with the aim to achieve a new type of dynamic optical metasurfaces for visible light.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

So far into the project, VisDOM has demonstrated that dynamically tunable conducting polymer nanoantennas can be compatible with nonlocal coupling mechanisms, even when having moderate resonance strengths. We used such coupling to demonstrate dynamically tunable conducting polymer metasurfaces with improved performance parameters by around one order of magnitude. The study provides important progress for the project, for example, demonstrating electron-beam lithography of conducting polymer nanostructure arrays. The publication was highlighted by our university as a “Major step for flat and adjustable optics”.

In parallel, anisotropic properties of aligned conducting polymer films have been studied, as may become particularly relevant in the later phase of the project. Here, the hyperbolic properties of such materials are used to achieve broadband chiral optical response.

Finally, we have demonstrated the first n-type plasmonic polymer nanoantennas, encompassing both nanofabrication and characterization of novel polymer nanostructures for nanooptics.

These milestones show clear progress in the project and open exciting pathways for the further development of tunable and functional polymer-based optical devices.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has produced results that clearly advance the field and go beyond the current state-of-the-art. Notably, we demonstrate the first nonlocal coupling of conducting polymer nanoantennas, leading to record performance in terms of both resonance quality factor and extinction modulation depth through redox-switching(Nature Communications 2025, 16, 4484) .

The outcome of VisDOM have been widely disseminated to the scientific community through several invited talks at major international conferences, including ICSM 2024 (Dresden), META 2024 (Toyama), MRS 2025 Spring Meeting (Seattle), SPIE Photonics West 2025 (San Francisco), Optica Advanced Photonics Congress 2025 (Marseille), Meta 2025 (Torremolinos) and Optics and Photonics Sweden (Kista).