Researchers create ultrafast tunable semiconductor metamaterial
An international team of researchers from Moscow State University (Russia), Sandia National Laboratories (U.S.), and Friedrich-Schiller University (Germany) have devised an ultrafast tunable metamaterial based on gallium arsenide nanoparticles. Their study was published in Nature Communications. The new optical metamaterial paves the way to ultrafast information transfer on the nanoscale.
Optical metamaterials are man-made media that acquire unusual optical properties due to nanostructuring. For almost 20 years, researchers have designed many metamaterial-based devices, including those hiding objects to those sensitive to minute concentrations of substances. However, upon fabrication, metamaterial properties remain fixed. The team came up with a way to turn metamaterials "on" and "off," and do it very quickly—more than 100 billion times per second.
Researchers fabricated the metamaterial from a thin gallium arsenide film by electron-beam lithography with subsequent plasma etching. The material consists of an array of semiconductor nanoparticles, which can resonantly concentrate and "hold" light at the nanoscale. In other words, when the light illuminates the metamaterial, it is "trapped" inside the nanoparticles and interacts more efficiently with them.
Read more.
