Gain assisted nanocomposite multilayers with near zero permittivity modulus at visible frequencies
arXiv:1105.5533 · doi:10.1063/1.3665414
Abstract
We have fabricated a layered nano-composite by alternating metal and gain medium layers, the gain dielectric consisting of a polymer incorporating optically pumped dye molecules. Exploiting an improved version of the effective medium theory, we have chosen the layers thicknesses for achieving a very small value of the real part of the permittivity epsilon_\| (parallel to the layers plane) at a prescribed visible wavelength. From standard reflection-transmission experiments on the optically pumped sample we show that, at a visible wavelength, both the real and the imaginary parts of the permittivity epsilon_\ attain very small values and we measure | ε_\| | = 0.04 at lambda = 604 nm, amounting to a 21.5-percent decrease of the minimum | ε_\| | in the absence of optical pumping. Our investigation thus proves that a medium with a dielectric permittivity with very small modulus, a key condition which should provide efficient subwavelength optical steering, can be actually synthesized.
Submitted for publication on Applied Physics Letters
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- Optically induced metal-to-dielectric transition in Epsilon-Near-Zero metamaterials
- Analytical Study of Sub-Wavelength Imaging by Uniaxial Epsilon-Near-Zero Metamaterial Slabs
- |ε|-Near-Zero materials in the near-infrared
- Study of plasmonic slot waveguides with a nonlinear metamaterial core: semi-analytical and numerical methods
- All-optical modulation in wavelength-sized epsilon-near-zero media
- Spatial nonlinearity in anisotropic metamaterial plasmonic slot waveguides
- Numerical simulation of light structures in bulk ENZ media with Kerr nonlinearity