|ε|-Near-Zero materials in the near-infrared

Abstract

We consider a mixture of metal coated quantum dots dispersed in a polymer matrix and, using a modified version of the standard Maxwell-Garnett mixing rule, we prove that the mixture parameters (particles radius, quantum dots gain, etc.) can be chosen so that the effective medium permittivity has an absolute value very close to zero in the near-infrared, i.e. |Re(epsilon)|<<1 and |Im (epsilon)|<<1 at the same near-infrared wavelength. Resorting to full-wave simulations, we investigate the accuracy of the effective medium predictions and we relate their discrepancy with rigorous numerical results to the fact that |epsilon|<<1 is a critical requirement. We show that a simple method for reducing this discrepancy, and hence for achieving a prescribed value of |ε|, consists in a subsequent fine-tuning of the nanoparticles volume filling fraction.

3 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Overcoming losses with gain in a negative refractive index metamaterial
• Singularity-driven Second and Third Harmonic Generation in a ε-near-zero nanolayer
• Gain assisted nanocomposite multilayers with near zero permittivity modulus at visible frequencies
• All-optical active plasmonic devices with memory and power switching functionalities based on epsilon-near-zero nonlinear metamaterials

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Electric Field Enhancement in ε-near-zero Slabs under TM-Polarized Oblique Incidence
• Low-damping epsilon-near-zero slabs: nonlinear and nonlocal optical properties
• Harmonic Generation in Multi-Resonant Plasma Films
• Reconfigurable photoinduced metamaterials in the microwave regime
• Study of plasmonic slot waveguides with a nonlinear metamaterial core: semi-analytical and numerical methods