Research
Metamaterials
"Metamaterials" is a new type of artificial optical materials with unusual optical properties.
The word of "Metamaterials" is composed of "Meta" and "Materials." "Meta" corresponds to "beyond" in English.
Therefore, the simple meaning of "Metamaterials" is "materials beyond materials."
In my research, I mainly focus on the metamaterials operating in the optical part of spectrum: Optical metamaterials.
Optical metamaterials open new opportunities for realizing exciting applications such as invisible cloak, super-resolution imaging and so on.
The image is from https://www.aph.kit.edu/wegener/english/264.php
Plasmonics
"Plasmonics" is the research field using "Plasmon." "Plasmon" is corrective oscillation of electrons that can couple to light.
The properties of plasmons are very different from usual light around us.
One of the examples is stained glasses. In the stained glasses, small metal particles disperse and make beautiful colors by coupling to light.
Plasmons enable to confine the electromagnetic energy in very small space.
Optical metamaterials also utilize these exotic properties of plasmons to realize unusual optical responses.
Nano fabrication, Micromachining
Generally, optical metamaterials are composed of small structures in the order of nanometers.
Fabrication of such a tiny structure is still difficult. However, we can fabricate some kinds of nanostructures by using state-of-art equipment.
Nowadays, there are several fabrication technique such as "Photo lithography", "Electron beam lithography," "Sputtering," and so on.
The right image is one examples of nanostructures fabricated by these kinds of technologies.
In our research, we fabricate nanostructures by nanofabrication and investigate optical responses to realize new functionalities of optical metamaterials.
