Reducing the losses of optical metamaterials
Description/Abstract
The field of metamaterials is driven by fascinating and far-reaching theoretical visions, such as perfect lenses, invisibility cloaking, and enhanced optical nonlinearities. However, losses have become the major obstacle towards real world applications in the optical regime. Reducing the losses of optical metamaterials becomes necessary and extremely important. In this thesis, two approaches are taken to reduce the losses. One is to construct an indefinite medium. Indefinite media are materials where not all the principal components of the permittivity and permeability tensors have the same sign. They do not need the resonances to achieve negative permittivity, {var_epsilon}. So, the losses can be comparatively small. To obtain indefinite media, three-dimensional (3D) optical metallic nanowire media with different structures are designed. They are numerically demonstrated that they are homogeneous effective indefinite anisotropic media by showing that their dispersion relations are hyperbolic. Negative group refraction and pseudo focusing are observed. Another approach is to incorporate gain into metamaterial nanostructures. The nonlinearity of gain is included by a generic four-level atomic model. A computational scheme is presented, which allows for a self-consistent treatment of a dispersive metallic photonic metamaterial coupled to a gain material incorporated into the nanostructure using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The loss compensations with gain are done for various structures, from 2D simplified models to 3D realistic structures. Results show the losses of optical metamaterials can be effectively compensated by gain. The effective gain coefficient of the combined system can be much larger than the bulk gain counterpart, due to the strong local-field enhancement.
| DOI | 10.2172/1037879 |
|---|---|
| Creator/Author: | Fang, Anan |
| Publication Date: | 2010 Dec 15 |
| OSTI Identifier: | OSTI ID: 1037879 |
| Report Number(s): | IS-T 2643 |
| DOE Contract Number: | DE-AC02-07CH11358 |
| DOI: | 10.2172/1037879 |
| Other Number(s): | TRN: US1201775 |
| Resource Type: | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Research Org: | Ames Laboratory (AMES), Ames, IA (United States) |
| Sponsoring Org: | USDOE Office of Science (SC) |
| Subject: | 74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS; 75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY; 77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY; ATOMIC MODELS; DISPERSION RELATIONS; FOCUSING; LENSES; NANOSTRUCTURES; PERMEABILITY; PERMITTIVITY; REFRACTION |
| Country of Publication: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Format: | Size: 2,868 Kb |
| Update Date: | 2012 Dec 05 |
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