Planar Optical Components Based on the Prepatterned Surfaces, Metasurfaces, and Hybrid Nanomaterials

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, metasurface research has received a great deal of attention because of the unique capabilities of metamaterials in the management of light. Among others, metasurfaces have been applied for the design of planar optical devices operating on a broad band ranging from the ultraviolet to the Terahertz. In principle, the advantage of these approaches is related to the compact architectures generated by metasurface design, but on top of that, metasurface-based devices exhibit higher performance than their bulk counterparts, leading to the realization of perfect absorbers, near-one numerical aperture lenses or achromatic optical components, among others. Despite their success at the lab, realistic applications would require dramatic improvements in terms of scalability of the nanofabrication processes and control on the metasurface response (reconfigurability).

An interesting complementary approach for the design of planar devices is based on the integration of hybrid nanomaterials. Heterostructures based on decorated nanoparticles, nanocomposites, surface chemistry or thin-film multilayers is extensively reported in literature as multifunctional materials. These approaches do not have the scalability problem found in metasurfaces, as they do not need nanolithography. Nevertheless, most approaches do not exhibit a clear collective response, and the synergic operation of their constituents is achieved in very limited and specific applications.

This Special Issue will look into the design of planar devices covering a wide range from the most specific technological issues to the most general and fundamental aspects related to the optical properties of the materials. We will look for new applications of metasurfaces, for their potential mass-scale fabrication, and for different ways to enable reconfigurability. We will attempt to cover recent advances in the growth of hybrid organic–inorganic heterostructures, in the description of their functionalities and their response to external stimuli—all with the aim to illustrate the state-of-art in the design of planar optical devices.

Dr. Josep Canet-Ferrer
Guest Editor

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