Photonic materials on demand

Abstract

As David Payne famously said, 'we never have a photonic material that we want...'. This has changed with the proliferation of nanotechnology. Metamaterials—artificial media structured on a sub-wavelength scale—offer a radical paradigm for the engineering of optical properties. Some remarkable advances have been possible with metamaterials. These include, for instance, negative-index media that refract light in the opposite direction from that of conventional materials, chiral materials that rotate the polarization state of light hundreds of thousands of times more strongly than natural optical crystals, and structured thin films with remarkably strong dispersion that can slow light in much the same way as resonant atomic systems with electromagnetically induced transparency.The research agenda is now shifting towards achieving tunable and switchable functionalities with metamaterials [1] where the goal is, paraphrasing Dave Payne, 'to have on demand the photonic material that we want'.The papers in this Journal of Optics special issue explore and review the different approaches to both switching and tuning of metamaterial properties through exploiting effects such as phase conjugation, intense photo-excitation and photoconductivity, the use of electro-optical effects in conductive oxides, the exploitation global quantum coherency and resonantly coupled classical resonator and quantum structures, hybridization with gain media and the manipulation with shapes and constitution of the complex metamolecules and metamaterial reliefs by design, or using MEMS actuation.