Manipulating light in a variety of ways—shrinking its wavelength and allowing it to travel freely in one direction while stopping it cold in another—hyperbolic metamaterials have wide application in optical communications and as nanoparticle sensors. But some of the same optical properties that make these metamaterials so appealing make them frustratingly difficult to evaluate.
CNST researchers have now developed a new measurement method that circumvents this difficulty. Using an off-the-shelf glass prism to enhance the interaction of incident light with hyperbolic metamaterials, a team led by Cheng Zhang of the CNST and the University of Maryland’s NanoCenter and Henri Lezec of NIST has devised a simple and much more accurate way to determine the permittivity.
Zhang, Lezec and their colleagues, which include researchers from the J.A. Woollam Co. in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, described their findings in a recent issue of ACS Photonics.
Read more: The light-warping properties of hyperbolic metamaterials
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