Optical Metacages

Abstract

We suggest a novel strategy for spectrally selective optical shielding of arbitrary shaped volumes by arranging specifically designed two- or three-layer nanowires around an area that needs to be protected. We show that such nanowire shields preserve their functionality for almost arbitrary geometry, and we term such structures optical metacages. We analyze several designs of such optical metacages made from either metallic or dielectric materials with experimentally measured parameters. We employ a semianalytical approach and also verify our results by numerical simulations. We further study optical properties of the introduced metacages in both near- and far-field regions, as well as analyze their frequency selectivity and the vanishing backscattering regime.