Fabrication of Metamaterials by Drawing Techniques
Abstract
Metamaterials - artificially structured materials with properties emerging from their structure rather than constituents - enable unprecedented control over propagation of light with applications such as lenses beating the diffraction limit for hyperfine imaging and lithography. Fabrication of metamaterials for the optical regime is extremely difficult, as highly structured, repetitive metallic features at the nanoscale are required. The main barrier to experimental realization of optical metamaterials is the great difficulty of fabricating on this scale. Approaches divide into two main classes. Bottom-up approaches include molecular self-assembly and self-ordering. Whilst having the advantage of self-assembly, the structures are, as a result, typically quite limited as it is difficult to introduce spatial variations required for most devices. Top-down approaches such as e-beam or focused ion beam lithography can readily produce complex structures, however they have to individually create every part of the structure, which is a time consuming use of extremely expensive equipment, and limited to shallow, mostly 2D, structures. No existing technology is suitable to produce materials structured at nanoscopic scales in bulk.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 27, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA570553
Entities
People
- Alessandro Tuniz
- Boris Kuhlmey
- Neetesh Singh
- Shaghik Atakaramians
- Simon Fleming
Organizations
- University of Sydney