Visible Metamaterial Using a Lithium Niobate Nanoring Structure for Stretchable Color Sensing Application

Abstract

All-dielectric metamaterials present the capability to generate high quality structure colors with outstanding color purity and filtering efficiency. In this study, a visible metamaterial composed of a lithium niobate (LiNbO3) nanoring (LNR) structure on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate is proposed. By carefully optimizing geometry configurations, a strong magnetic dipole (MD) resonance is stimulated and other multipole resonances are effectively suppressed with the assistance of surface lattice resonance, and then single reflection peaks are generated with high efficiencies up to 99% and narrow bandwidths smaller than 9 nm. Moreover, benefiting from the stretchable property of the PDMS substrate, LNR metamaterial has the potential to be actively tuned by mechanically changing the period of unit cells and then realizing the reflected color changes. Meanwhile, LNR metamaterial is also sensitive to the change of the ambient environment; the figure of merit can be up to 311.11 RIU–1. It indicates LNR metamaterial possesses potentials in stretchable electronics, color generating, light fidelity (LiFi) filtering, and biochemical sensing applications.