Building multiscale optical metamaterials from non-conventional active and switchable nanoscale elements

Abstract

We demonstrate the bottom¿up engineering of active semiconductor/rare earth-ion nano-hybrids and switchable polaritonic/plasmonic nano-bismuth structures. We show that these non-conventional nanoscale elements can be assembled into multiscale optical metamaterial architectures for integrated nanophotonic solutions with lighting, light modulation and ultra-sensitive environmental sensing functionalities.