Electrically Tunable Metamaterials Based on Multimaterial Nanowires Incorporating Transparent Conductive Oxides

Abstract

We present novel design approaches for metasurfaces and metamaterials with electrical tunability offering real-time manipulation of light and serving as multifunctional devices in near-infrared frequency regime (at the specific wavelength of 1.55 μm). For this purpose, we integrate indium-tin-oxide (ITO) as a tunable electro-optical material into multimaterial nanowires with metal-oxide-semiconductor and metal-insulator-metal configurations. In particular, an active metasurface operating in the transmission mode is designed which allows for modulation of the transmitted light phase over 280 degrees. This large phase modulation is afforded in the cost of low transmission efficiency. We demonstrate the use of such active metasurfaces for tunable bending and focusing in free-space. Moreover, we investigate the implementation of this material in deeply subwavelength multimaterial nanowires, which can yield strong variations in the effective refractive index by the virtue of internal homogenization enabling tunability of the performance in gradient refractive index metamaterials. In the theoretical modeling of these structures, we adopt a hierarchical multiscale approach by linking drift-diffusion transport model with the electromagnetic model which rigorously characterizes the electro-optical effects.