Mie Resonance Based All-Dielectric Metamaterials at Optical Frequencies

Abstract

Electromagnetic metamaterials are artificially fabricated structures that exhibit properties unattainable in naturally occurring materials, such as negative index, epsilon-near-zero, ultra-high index, perfect lensing, and cloaking. Since their inception, metallic unit cells have dominated the field of metamaterials. However, metallic unit cells suffer from conduction loss, magnetic saturation at high frequencies, often exhibit an anisotropic optical response, and require expensive lithography methods for fabrication. Recently, there has been burgeoning interest in exploiting the Mie resonances in high index dielectric particles to design all-dielectric metamaterials, which not only have much less absorption losses at optical frequencies than their metallic counterparts but also provide the potential for achieving isotropic optical responses due to their simple unit cell geometry. The main motivation of this dissertation is two fold - first, to understand how electric and magnetic Mie resonances in dielectric particles can be used to design metamaterials exhibiting novel and unique optical properties; and second, to experimentally realize metamaterials using nanofabrication techniques, with a strong motivation towards achieving three dimensional and large scale metamaterials .