Control of reflectance and transmittance in scattering and curvilinear hyperbolic metamaterials

We demonstrate reduced reflectance in curvilinear lamellar hyperbolic metamaterials as well as planar hyperbolic metamaterials consisting of metal/dielectric multilayers, with scatterers deposited on the top. The reduced reflectance is accompanied by a significant enhancement in transmission along with non-reciprocity of transmittance in forward and backward propagating directions. The observed experimental behavior is qualitatively similar to the results of numerical solutions of Maxwell equations. The findings of this study pave the way to a variety of important applications, including broadband enhancement of light trapping in photovoltaic devices. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4746387

Reduced reflection from roughened hyperbolic metamaterial

We show that roughened surfaces of hyperbolic metamaterials scatter light preferentially inside the media, resulting in a very low reflectance. This phenomenon of fundamental importance, demonstrated experimentally in arrays of silver nanowires grown in alumina membranes, is consistent with a broad-band singularity in the density of photonic states. It paves the road to a variety of applications ranging from the stealth technology to high-efficiency solar cells and photodetectors. (C) 2013 Optical Society of Americ