The quest for low loss high refractive index dielectric materials for UV photonic applications

Abstract

Nanostructured High Refractive Index (HRI) dielectricmaterials, when acting as nanoantennas or metasurfaces in the near-infrared (NIR) and visible (VIS) spectral ranges, can interact with light and show interesting scattering directionality properties. Also, HRI dielectricmaterials with low absorption in these spectral ranges show very low heat radiation when illuminated. Up to now,most of the studies of these kind of materials have been explored in the VIS-NIR. However, to the best of our knowledge, these properties have not been extended to the ultraviolet (UV), where their application in fields like photocatalysis, biosensing, surface-enhanced spectroscopies or light guiding and trapping can be of extraordinary relevance. Here, we present a detailed numerical study of the directional scattering properties, near-field enhancement and heat generation of severalmaterials that can be good candidates for those applications in theUV. Thesematerials include aluminumphosphide, aluminumarsenide, aluminum nitride, diamond, cerium dioxide and titanium dioxide. In this study, we compare their performance when forming either isolated nanoparticles or dimers to build either nanoantennas or unit cells formore complexmetasurfaces.