15,321 research outputs found
Printable Nanoscopic Metamaterial Absorbers and Images with Diffraction-Limited Resolution
The fabrication of functional metamaterials with extreme feature resolution
finds a host of applications such as the broad area of surface/light
interaction. Non-planar features of such structures can significantly enhance
their performance and tunability, but their facile generation remains a
challenge. Here, we show that carefully designed out-of-plane nanopillars made
of metal-dielectric composites integrated in a metal-dielectric-nanocomposite
configuration, can absorb broadband light very effectively. We further
demonstrate that electrohydrodynamic printing in a rapid nanodripping mode, is
able to generate precise out-of-plane forests of such composite nanopillars
with deposition resolutions at the diffraction limit on flat and non-flat
substrates. The nanocomposite nature of the printed material allows the
fine-tuning of the overall visible light absorption from complete absorption to
complete reflection by simply tuning the pillar height. Almost perfect
absorption (~95%) over the entire visible spectrum is achieved by a nanopillar
forest covering only 6% of the printed area. Adjusting the height of individual
pillar groups by design, we demonstrate on-demand control of the gray scale of
a micrograph with a spatial resolution of 400 nm. These results constitute a
significant step forward in ultra-high resolution facile fabrication of
out-of-plane nanostructures, important to a broad palette of light design
applications. nanostructures, important to a broad palette of light design
applications
Topographical coloured plasmonic coins
The use of metal nanostructures for colourization has attracted a great deal
of interest with the recent developments in plasmonics. However, the current
top-down colourization methods based on plasmonic concepts are tedious and time
consuming, and thus unviable for large-scale industrial applications. Here we
show a bottom-up approach where, upon picosecond laser exposure, a full colour
palette independent of viewing angle can be created on noble metals. We show
that colours are related to a single laser processing parameter, the total
accumulated fluence, which makes this process suitable for high throughput
industrial applications. Statistical image analyses of the laser irradiated
surfaces reveal various distributions of nanoparticle sizes which control
colour. Quantitative comparisons between experiments and large-scale
finite-difference time-domain computations, demonstrate that colours are
produced by selective absorption phenomena in heterogeneous nanoclusters.
Plasmonic cluster resonances are thus found to play the key role in colour
formation.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
Avoidance and Coalescence of Delamination Patterns
Delamination of coatings and thin films from substrates generates a
fascinating variety of patterns, from circular blisters to wrinkles and
labyrinth domains, in a way that is not completely understood. We report on
large-scale numerical simulations of the universal problem of avoidance and
coalescence of delamination wrinkles, focusing on a case study of graphene
sheets on patterned substrates. By nucleating and growing wrinkles in a
controlled way, we are able to characterize how their interactions, mediated by
long-range stress fields, determine their formation and morphology. We also
study how the interplay between geometry and stresses drives a universal
transition from conformation to delamination when sheets are deposited on
particle-decorated substrates. Our results are directly applicable to strain
engineering of graphene and also uncover universal phenomena observed at all
scales, as for example in geomembrane deposition
Substrate influence on the plasmonic response of clusters of spherical nanoparticles
The plasmonic response of nanoparticles is exploited in many subfields of
science and engineering to enhance optical signals associated with probes of
nanoscale and subnanoscale entities. We develop a numerical algorithm based on
previous theoretical work that addresses the influence of a substrate on the
plasmonic response of collections of nanoparticles of spherical shape. Our
method is a real space approach within the quasi-static limit that can be
applied to a wide range of structures. We illustrate the role of the substrate
through numerical calculations that explore single nanospheres and nanosphere
dimers fabricated from either a Drude model metal or from silver on dielectric
substrates, and from dielectric spheres on silver substrates.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure
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