Broadband single molecule SERS detection designed by warped optical spaces.

Engineering hotspots is of crucial importance in many applications including energy harvesting, nano-lasers, subwavelength imaging, and biomedical sensing. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectroscopy is a key technique to identify analytes that would otherwise be difficult to diagnose. In standard systems, hotspots are realised with nanostructures made by acute tips or narrow gaps. Owing to the low probability for molecules to reach such tiny active regions, high sensitivity is always accompanied by a large preparation time for analyte accumulation which hinders the time response. Inspired by transformation optics, we introduce an approach based on warped spaces to manipulate hotspots, resulting in broadband enhancements in both the magnitude and volume. Experiments for single molecule detection with a fast soaking time are realised in conjunction with broadband response and uniformity. Such engineering could provide a new design platform for a rich manifold of devices, which can benefit from broadband and huge field enhancements.

Enhanced Solar-to-Hydrogen Generation with Broadband Epsilon-Near-Zero Nanostructured Photocatalysts.

The direct conversion of solar energy into fuels or feedstock is an attractive approach to address increasing demand of renewable energy sources. Photocatalytic systems relying on the direct photoexcitation of metals have been explored to this end, a strategy that exploits the decay of plasmonic resonances into hot carriers. An efficient hot carrier generation and collection requires, ideally, their generation to be enclosed within few tens of nanometers at the metal interface, but it is challenging to achieve this across the broadband solar spectrum. Here the authors demonstrate a new photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution based on metal epsilon-near-zero metamaterials. The authors have designed these to achieve broadband strong light confinement at the metal interface across the entire solar spectrum. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy, the authors prove that hot carriers are generated in a broadband fashion within 10 nm in this system. The resulting photocatalyst achieves a hydrogen production rate of 9.5 µmol h-1 cm-2 that exceeds, by a factor of 3.2, that of the best previously reported plasmonic-based photocatalysts for the dissociation of H2 with 50 h stable operation.

Fundamental and high-order anapoles in all-dielectric metamaterials via Fano-Feshbach modes competition.

One of the most fascinating possibilities enabled by metamaterials is the strong reduction of the electromagnetic scattering from nanostructures. In dielectric nanoparticles, the formation of a minimal scattering state at specific wavelengths is associated with the excitation of photonic anapoles, which represent a peculiar type of radiationless state and whose existence has been demonstrated experimentally. In this work, we investigate the formation of anapole states in generic dielectric structures by applying a Fano-Feshbach projection scheme, a general technique widely used in the study of quantum mechanical open systems. By expressing the total scattering from the structure in terms of an orthogonal set of internal and external modes, defined in the interior and in the exterior of the dielectric structure, respectively, we show how anapole states are the result of a complex interaction among the resonances of the system and the surrounding environment. We apply our approach to a circular resonator, where we observe the formation of higher-order anapole states, which are originated by the superposition of several internal resonances of the system.

Scalable, ultra-resistant structural colors based on network metamaterials.

Structural colors have drawn wide attention for their potential as a future printing technology for various applications, ranging from biomimetic tissues to adaptive camouflage materials. However, an efficient approach to realize robust colors with a scalable fabrication technique is still lacking, hampering the realization of practical applications with this platform. Here, we develop a new approach based on large-scale network metamaterials that combine dealloyed subwavelength structures at the nanoscale with lossless, ultra-thin dielectric coatings. By using theory and experiments, we show how subwavelength dielectric coatings control a mechanism of resonant light coupling with epsilon-near-zero regions generated in the metallic network, generating the formation of saturated structural colors that cover a wide portion of the spectrum. Ellipsometry measurements support the efficient observation of these colors, even at angles of 70°. The network-like architecture of these nanomaterials allows for high mechanical resistance, which is quantified in a series of nano-scratch tests. With such remarkable properties, these metastructures represent a robust design technology for real-world, large-scale commercial applications.

Superadiabatic evolution of acoustic and vorticity perturbations in Couette flow.

Nonadiabatic transitions between the acoustic and the vorticity modes perturbing a plane Couette flow are examined in the context of higher-order WKB asymptotics. In the case of the Schrödinger equation, it is known that looking at the solution expressed in the superadiabatic base, composed of higher-order asymptotic solutions, smoothes quantum state transitions. Then, increasing the order of the superadiabatic base causes these transitions to tend to the Gauss error function, and, once an optimal order is reached, the asymptotic process starts to diverge. We show that for perturbations in Couette flow, similar results can be applied on the amplitudes of the vorticity and acoustic modes. This allows us to more closely track the emergence of the acoustic modes in the presence of the vorticity mode.