AMADEus Seminar - Prof. Vinothan Manoharan - Friday 4 July 2014, 02:00 pm - Aérocampus, Latresne

Making metafluids through colloidal self-assembly

Abstract

A metafluid is a collection of electromagnetic resonators that have an isotropic response to incoming light. Because the resonators need not be oriented in any particular direction, metafluids are perhaps the simplest metamaterial to fabricate -- if one can first design resonators with an isotropic response. I will discuss our efforts to build such structures using metallic colloidal particles, which have plasmonic resonances in the visible and near-infrared. The challenge is to organize these 100-nm-scale metallic particles into high-symmetry structures, such as tetrahedra, that have very little variability between structures, so that the electric and magnetic resonances of all the particles are at the same frequency. Self-assembly of colloidal particles, combined with chemical synthesis, may be the only practical way to make such materials.