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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1993

Subwavelength structured surfaces and their applications

The term subwavelength structured (SWS) surface describes any surface that contains a subwavelength-period grating or gratings. The grating may be of any type provided the period is sufficiently fine so that, unlike conventional gratings, no diffraction orders propagate other than the zeroth orders. Because of the fine periods involved, the fabrication of such surfaces for applications in the visible and infrared portions of the spectral regime have only recently been considered. With refinements in holographic procedures and the push of the semiconductor industry for submicron lithography, production of SWS surfaces is becoming increasingly viable. The topics covered include the following: analytic approaches to analyze SWS surfaces, 1D periodic stratification and effective medium theory, design of waveplates using form birefringence, and 2D binary antireflection structured surfaces.

Raguin, Daniel H.↗
DOE OSTI2015

A collimated focused ultrasound beam of high acoustic transmission and minimum diffraction achieved by using a lens with subwavelength structures

An acoustic focusing lens incorporated with periodically aligned subwavelength grooves corrugated on its spherical surface has been developed. It is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally that acoustic focusing achieved by using the lens can suppress the relative side-lobe amplitudes, enhance the focal gain, and minimize the shifting of the focus. Use of the lens coupled with a planar ultrasound transducer can generate an ultrasound beam with enhanced acoustic transmission and collimation effect, which offers the capability of improving the safety, efficiency, and accuracy of targeted surgery implemented by high intensity focused ultrasound.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2014

Enhanced absorption of graphene strips with a multilayer subwavelength grating structure

The optical absorption of graphene strips covered on a multilayer subwavelength grating (MSG) surface is theoretically investigated. The absorption of graphene strips with MSG is enhanced in the wavelength range of 1500 nm to 1600 nm by critical coupling, which is associated with the combined effects of a guided resonance of MSG and its photonic band gap effect. The critical coupling of the graphene strips can be controlled by adjusting the incident angle without changing the structural parameters of MSG. The absorption of graphene strips can also be tuned by varying key parameters, such as grating period, strip width, and incident angle.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2017

Directed-Assembly of Block Copolymers for Large-Scale, Three-Dimensional, Optical Metamaterials at Visible Wavelengths. Final LDRD Report

Metamaterials are composites with patterned subwavelength features where the choice of materials and subwavelength structuring bestows upon the metamaterials unique optical properties not found in nature, thereby enabling optical applications previously considered impossible. However, because the structure of optical metamaterials must be subwavelength, metamaterials operating at visible wavelengths require features on the order of 100 nm or smaller, and such resolution typically requires top-down lithographic fabrication techniques that are not easily scaled to device-relevant areas that are square centimeters in size. In this project, we developed a new fabrication route using block copolymers to make over large device-relevant areas optical metamaterials that operate at visible wavelengths. Our structures are smaller in size (sub-100 nm) and cover a larger area (cm 2 ) than what has been achieved with traditional nanofabrication routes. To guide our experimental efforts, we developed an algorithm to calculate the expected optical properties (specifically the index of refraction) of such metamaterials that predicts that we can achieve surprisingly large changes in optical properties with small changes in metamaterials’ structure. In the course of our work, we also found that the ordered metal nanowires meshes produced by our scalable fabrication route for making optical metamaterials may also possibly act as transparent electrodes, which are needed in electrical displays and solar cells. We explored the ordered metal nanowires meshes’ utility for this application and developed design guidelines to aide our experimental efforts.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2015

Structural color printing based on plasmonic metasurfaces of perfect light absorption

Subwavelength structural color filtering and printing technologies employing plasmonic nanostructures have recently been recognized as an important and beneficial complement to the traditional colorant-based pigmentation. However, the color saturation, brightness and incident angle tolerance of structural color printing need to be improved to meet the application requirement. Here we demonstrate a structural color printing method based on plasmonic metasurfaces of perfect light absorption to improve color performances such as saturation and brightness. Thin-layer perfect absorbers with periodic hole arrays are designed at visible frequencies and the absorption peaks are tuned by simply adjusting the hole size and periodicity. Near perfect light absorption with high quality factors are obtained to realize high-resolution, angle-insensitive plasmonic color printing with high color saturation and brightness. Moreover, the fabricated metasurfaces can be protected with a protective coating for ambient use without degrading performances. The demonstrated structural color printing platform offers great potential for applications ranging from security marking to information storage.

77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2015

Electric and magnetic response in dielectric dark states for low loss subwavelength optical meta atoms

Artificially created surfaces or metasurfaces, composed of appropriately shaped subwavelength structures, namely, meta-atoms, control light at subwavelength scales. Historically, metasurfaces have used radiating metallic resonators as subwavelength inclusions. However, while resonant optical metasurfaces made from metal have been sufficiently subwavelength in the propagation direction, they are too lossy for many applications. Metasurfaces made out of radiating dielectric resonators have been proposed to solve the loss problem, but are marginally subwavelength at optical frequencies. We designed subwavelength resonators made out of nonradiating dielectrics. The resonators are decorated with appropriately placed scatterers, resulting in a meta-atom with an engineered electromagnetic response. A metasurface that yields an electric response is fabricated, experimentally characterized, and a method to obtain a magnetic response at optical frequencies is theoretically demonstrated. In conclusion, this design methodology paves the way for metasurfaces that are simultaneously subwavelength and low loss.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2015

Subwavelength films for standoff radiation dosimetry

We present optical subwavelength nanostructure architecture suitable for standoff radiation dosimetry with remote optical readout in the visible or infrared spectral regions. To achieve this, films of subwavelength structures are fabricated over several square inches via the creation of a 2D non-close packed (NCP) array template of radiation-sensitive polymeric nanoparticles, followed by magnetron sputtering of a metallic coating to form a 2D array of separated hemispherical nanoscale metallic shells. The nanoshells are highly reflective at resonance in the visible or infrared depending on design. These structures and their behavior are based on the open ring resonator (ORR) architecture and have their analog in resonant inductive-capacitive (LC) circuits, which display a resonance wavelength that is inversely proportional to the square root of the product of the inductance and capacitance. Therefore, any modification of the nanostructure material properties due to radiation alters the inductive or capacitive behavior of the subwavelength features, which in turn changes their optical properties resulting in a shift in the optical resonance. This shift in resonance may be remotely interrogated actively using either laser illumination or passively by hyperspectral or multispectral sensing with broadband illumination. These structures may be designed to be either anisotropic or isotropic, which can also offer polarization-sensitive interrogation. We present experimental measurements of a radiation induced shift in the optical resonance of a subwavelength film after exposure to an absorbed dose of gamma radiation from 2 Mrad up to 62 Mrad demonstrating the effect. Interestingly the resonance shift is non-monotonic for this material system and possible radiation damage mechanisms to the nanoparticles are discussed.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2013

Subwavelength resonant nanostructured films for sensing

We present a novel subwavelength nanostructure architecture that may be utilized for optical standoff sensing applications. The subwavelength structures are fabricated via a combination of nanoimprint lithography and metal sputtering to create metallic nanostructured films encased within a transparent media. The structures are based on the open ring resonator (ORR) architecture and have their analog in resonant LC circuits, which display a resonance frequency that is inversely proportional to the square root of the product of the inductance and capacitance. Therefore, any perturbation of the nanostructured films due to chemical or environmental effects can alter the inductive or capacitive behavior of the subwavelength features, which can shift the resonant frequency and provide an indication of the external stimulus. This shift in resonance can be interrogated remotely either actively using either laser illumination or passively using hyperspectral or multispectral sensing. These structures may be designed to be either anisotropic or isotropic, which can also provide polarization-sensitive interrogation. Due to the nanometer-scale of the structures, they can be tailored to be optically responsive in the visible or near infrared spectrum with a highly reflective resonant peak that is dependent solely on structural dimensions and material characteristics. We present experimental measurements of the optical response of these structures as a function of wavelength, polarization, and incident angle demonstrating the resonant effect in the near infrared region. Numerical modeling data showing the effect of different fabrication parameters such as structure parameters are also discussed.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory↗
DOE OSTI2020

Dynamical Control of Broadband Coherent Absorption in ENZ Films

Interferometric effects between two counter-propagating beams incident on an optical system can lead to a coherent modulation of the absorption of the total electromagnetic radiation with 100% efficiency even in deeply subwavelength structures. Coherent perfect absorption (CPA) rises from a resonant solution of the scattering matrix and often requires engineered optical properties. For instance, thin film CPA benefits from complex nanostructures with suitable resonance, albeit at a loss of operational bandwidth. In this work, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a broadband CPA based on light-with-light modulation in epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) subwavelength films. We show that unpatterned ENZ films with different thicknesses exhibit broadband CPA with a near-unity maximum value located at the ENZ wavelength. By using Kerr optical nonlinearities, we dynamically tune the visibility and peak wavelength of the total energy modulation. Our results based on homogeneous thick ENZ media open a route towards on-chip devices that require efficient light absorption and dynamical tunability.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2013

Preparation and characterization of SiO₂:Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays with 1.06 μm laser antireflective property

SiO₂: Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays with excellent antireflective property at 1.06 μm were synthesized by a template-assisted sol–gel process. The molecular structure, morphology and optical properties of the fabricated SiO₂:Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays were investigated by a Fourier transform infrared spectroscope (FTIR), a Scanning electron microscope (SEM), and a spectro-fluorometer, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the SiO₂:Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays were formed via the AAO membrane during the sol–gel process. The remarkable antireflective characteristic of about 0.166% at 1.06 μm was attributed to the drastic decrease of effective refraction index which enhances the matching effect between air and substrate. As well as the absorption performance of Sm³⁺ at 1.06 μm which consumes the energies of incident light. - Graphical abstract: Directional aligned SiO₂:Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays were synthesized in AAO template by sol–gel process, and the antiflective performance of arrays is prominent comparing to the blank AAO template. Highlights: • SiO₂:Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays are synthesized by a template-assisted sol–gel process. • SiO₂:Sm³⁺ nanotube arrays have remarkable antireflective properties at 1.06 μm. • The subwavelength structure results in a decrease of effective refraction index. • The absorption performance of Sm³⁺ at 1.06 μm consume the energies of incident light.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2025

Comparing Machine Learning and Physics-Based Nanoparticle Geometry Determinations Using Far-Field Spectral Properties

Anisotropic metal nanostructures exhibit polarization-dependent light scattering, a property which has been widely studied and exploited to determine orientations of subwavelength structures using far-field microscopy. Here we explore the use of variational autoencoders (VAEs) to determine the geometries of gold nanorods (NRs) such as in-plane orientation and aspect ratio under linearly polarized dark-field illumination in an optical microscope. We enforce a shared latent space to connect two VAEs trained separately with polarized dark-field scattering spectra and electron microscopy images and achieve image prediction (shape, orientation, and size) of Au NRs using only polarized dark-field scattering spectra. We determine the geometrical parameters of orientational angle and aspect ratio quantitatively via both our dual-VAE and physics-based analysis on the input scattering spectra. We show that orientational angle prediction by dual-VAE performs well with only a small (~300 particle) training set, yielding a mean absolute error (MAE) of 14.4° and a concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.95. This performance is only marginally worse than the physics-based cos(2?) fitting approach between the scattering intensity and the polarizing angle, which achieves MAE of 8.78° and CCC of 0.99. Aspect ratio determination is also comparable for the dual-VAE and physics-based fitting comparison (MAE of 0.21 vs. 0.23 and CCC of 0.53 vs. 0.68). Here, this dual encoder-decoder architecture effectively exploits the structure-property relationships of plasmonic nanostructures to construct a cross-modal machine learning (ML) approach, providing a pathway to employ ML approaches to address other structure-property relationships in materials science.

Dark-field scattering↗
DOE OSTI2021

Large-Scale Metasurfaces Based on Grayscale Nanosphere Lithography

Metasurfaces, based on subwavelength structuring, provide a versatile platform for wavefront manipulation in an ultrathin form factor. The manufacturing of metasurfaces, however, generally requires fabrication techniques, such as electron-beam lithography, that are not scalable. One alternative is the use of ultraviolet steppers, but these require significant capital investment and there are challenges in handling the large mask sizes that metasurfaces demand due to the structuring density. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel manufacturing method based on self-assembly of nanospheres in combination with grayscale lithography. This technique enables large-scale metasurfaces with nonperiodic phase profiles while being cost-effective. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate a series of large-scale (1 mm diameter) metalenses demonstrating diffraction-limited focusing as well as holograms. This approach could open new doors to cost-effective and large-scale fabrication of a wide range of metasurface-based optics.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2017

Single-Layer Plasmonic Metasurface Half-Wave Plates with Wavelength-Independent Polarization Conversion Angle

Manipulation of polarization state is of great fundamental importance and plays a crucial role in modern photonic applications such as optical communication, imaging, and sensing. Metamaterials and metasurfaces have attracted increasing interest in this area because they facilitate designer optical response through engineering the composite subwavelength structures. In this paper, we propose a general methods of designing half-wave plate and demonstrate in the near-infrared wavelength range an optically thin plasmonic metasurface half-wave plates that rotate the polarization direction of the linearly polarized incident light with a high degree of linear polarization. Finally, the half-wave plate functionality is realized through arranging the orientation of the nanoantennas to form an appropriate spatial distribution profile, which behave exactly as in classical half-wave plates but over in a wavelength-independent way.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Modeling of threshold and dynamics behavior of organic nanostructured lasers

Organic dye molecules offer significant potential as gain media in the emerging field of optical amplification and lasing at subwavelength scales. In this article, we investigate the laser dynamics in systems comprising subwavelength-structured cavities that incorporate organic dyes. To this end, we have developed a comprehensive theoretical framework able to accurately describe the interaction of organic molecules with any arbitrary photonic structure to produce single-mode lasing. The model provides explicit analytic expressions of the threshold and slope efficiency that characterize this class of lasers, and also the duration over which lasing action can be sustained before the dye photobleaches. Both the physical properties of the dyes and the optical properties of the cavities are considered. We also systematically studied the feasibility of achieving lasing action under continuous-wave excitation in optically pumped monolithic organic dye lasers. This study suggests routes to realize an organic laser that can potentially lase with a threshold of only a few W cm -2 . In conclusion, our work puts forward a theoretical formalism that could enable the advancement of nanostructured organic-based light emitting and sensing devices.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗