Designing large scale chiral metamaterials by nanosphere shadowing lithography

摘要

A scalable nanofabrication technique for chiral metamaterials is presented, which combines the dynamic shadowing growth and self-assembled nanosphere monolayers, and is also known as nanosphere shadowing lithography. We have developed two strategies based on nanosphere shadowing lithography to prepare chiral nanostructures. The first strategy is to create a quasi-three-dimensional single-layer fan-shaped chiral nanostructure on nanospheres with one plasmonic material. The second strategy is to create three-dimensional multi-layers helical nanostructures with one plasmonic material and one dielectric material. Both strategies can produce large-area chiral nanostructures with strong chiral optical response, which makes nanosphere shadowing lithography suitable for producing chiral metamaterial based devices such as an ultrathin narrow-band circular polarizer.