Electromagnetic properties of anisotropic plasmonic metamaterials .

摘要

In this dissertation we study the electromagnetic properties of plasmonic metamaterials. We develop an analytical description to solve the fundamental problem of free-space scattering in planar plasmonic systems by utilizing anisotropic metamaterials. We show with exact numerical simulations that these manufactured materials do completely eliminate the scattering, and even in the case of fabrication defects the scattering is greatly minimized.;We further show that the standard effective medium theory calculations for the cases of anisotropic metamaterials constructed of metal-dielectric layers fails to account for nonlocal effects in the cases where the constituent materials have large differences in permittivity. We show how it is possible to construct a plasmon waveguide out of such a structure and describe a new naming scheme based on the bulk plasmon modes that are supported.;Finally, we study the effective medium theory applied to the case of plasmonic wires embedded in a dielectric host. We describe the effect the geometric properties of the structure has on effective permittivities. For example, we show that a 10% stretching/compression of the distance between nanowires can change the sign of elements of the permittivity tensor.;These results can be applied to high-performance optical sensing, optical polarizers, novel lenses including the hyper- and superlenses, and subdiffraction imaging.