Metamaterials offer tantalizing future prospects such as high-resolution optical microscopes and superfast optical computers. To realize the vast potential of metamaterials, however, scientists will need to hone their understanding of the fundamental physics behind them. This will require accurately predicting nonlinear optical properties—meaning that interaction with light changes a material’s properties, for example, light emerges from the material with a different frequency than when it entered. Help has arrived.
Scientists with the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Univ. of California (UC) Berkeley have shown, using a recent theory for nonlinear light scattering when light passes through nanostructures, that it is possible to predict the nonlinear optical properties of metamaterials.
“The key question has been whether one can determine the nonlinear behavior of metamaterials from their exotic linear behavior,” says Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Div. and an international authority on metamaterial engineering who led this study. “We’ve shown that the relative nonlinear susceptibility of large classes of metamaterials can be predicted using a comprehensive nonlinear scattering theory. This will allow us to efficiently design metamaterials with strong nonlinearity for important applications such as coherent Raman sensing, entangled photon generation and frequency conversion.”
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