Novel applications of plasmonic metamaterials

Metamaterials are the artificial materials composed of multiple individual elements in specially designed periodic subwavelength patterns. The properties of these metamaterials strongly depend on the featured shape or size of the unit of metamaterials rather than the original properties of the composition of materials. Their precise shape, geometry, size, orientation and arrangement can affect the light in an unconventional manner, creating material properties which are unachievable with conventional materials, such as negative refractive index, abnormal reflection, and so on. Due to these fascinating properties, we have designed and fabricated various plasmonic metamaterials with localized energy, electromagnetic field enhancement, and nonlinearity by the state of the art methods, such as e-beam lithography with multi-exposure technique, focus ion beam drilling, ultrafast laser direct writing, phase-change materials etching process, etc… This talk will discuss about the diverse novel applications for the plasmonic metamaterials in the green energy, environment, and better life, respectively. As for the applications in the green energy, it will cover environmentally friendly green energy sources, high-efficiency solar energy conversion over entire spectrum, and nonlinear plasmonic nano-laser. The metamaterials could also be used for the high efficiency photo-catalyst water treatments, high-efficiency broad-band gradient meta-surface, three-dimensional full color plasmonic holograph, three-dimensional split ring resonators based biosensor, hyperbolic metamaterials for subwavelength resolution, and so on. These novel applications pave new ways to apply the fundamental physics of plasmonic metamaterials to achieve clean environment with high-efficiency energy sources, as well as the bright future of human being life.