Carbon quantum initiators enabled direct laser writing: A technique for fabrication of dielectric, all-carbon chiral metasurfaces

Abstract

Chiral metasurfaces exhibit extraordinary capabilities of steering polarization of electromagnetic waves; and hence offering enormous potential in development of ultrathin components for advanced photonic technologies such as quantum computing and communication, imaging, optical memories and logics. These structures are realized by periodically arranged subwavelength resolved artificial elements (metaelements). Metaelements are mainly metallic, dielectric or metal-dielectric based and their fabrication is a daunting task due to the associated complex fabrication methodologies involving serial, time-consuming processes and sophisticated instrumentation, hence limiting the growth, and application of these metasurfaces to its true potential. To mitigate these issues, we exploited the single-step fabrication capabilities of two-photon polymerization based lithography to generate a range of all-carbon-based dielectric chiral metasurfaces in a carbon-polymer nanocomposite resin. Additionally, theoretical responses of these structures are also calculated. These structures derive their responses from structural chirality. With the advantages of single-step fabrication of any arbitrary structure with sub-wavelength resolved features, along with the capability of rapid prototyping in the proposed material system; this work holds a great potential towards generation of all-carbon metamaterials and 3D metasurfaces for several advanced photonic and optical technologies.