Investigation into Sculpted Film Metamaterials for Designed Electromagnetic Behavior
EMSL Project ID
41791
Abstract
Sculpted thin films are a class of nanoengineered surfaces that have been designed to exhibit specific scattering characteristics in a particular electromagnetic band. The particular surfaces targeted in this proposal are periodic in nature and are designed to interact with an incident electromagnetic wave (EM) in such a fashion as to make the surface functional. Such a sculpted film is also termed a "metamaterial," and this class of materials have been built to exhibit specific EM interaction behavior not found typically in nature, such as materials with an effective negative refractive index. Sculpted films have been theoretically investigated to operate at optical wavelengths using periodic structures with chiral symmetry. Such periodic structures can be designed to operate as narrow band-pass and band reject filters that can be tuned using electro-optic materials. Such materials are challenging to fabricate, however, using conventional chemical vapor deposition as their symmetry prevents large-scale fabrication through deposition and rotational processes. Our long-term goals are several. We wish to demonstrate the operation of functional sculpted films on the nanometer scale. EM simulations show promise, and an actual physical film verifying the simulated behavior would be a significant advancement. The nature of the designed surfaces precludes their obvious fabrication using conventional CVD processes, and we wish to demonstrate a functional surface using nanometer-scale sculpting. Large area surfaces are a final fabrication process we would like to demonstrate using the creation of inverted molds and surface stamping. Electrically-functional materials, such as using elecro-optic materials, is also a desired outcome of this effort.
Project Details
Project type
Exploratory Research
Start Date
2010-11-17
End Date
2011-11-20
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members