Metasurface and its Alternatives for Nanophotonic Applications

Abstract

The recent advancements in nanophotonics, material science and nanofabrication technologies, and the availability of high-performance computing has allowed us to significantly improve our ability to control light-matter interaction. An emerging technology that allows us to achieve precise control over light-matter interaction is metasurface. Metasurfaces have found their way into a number of applications including communication, sensing, polarization control and imaging. Although metasurface has proven to provide superior performance compared to available alternatives, it faces certain limitations such as the requirement of expensive and complex fabrication processes. Therefore, metasurface should be used when only when their performance justifies the additional cost and complexity. The objective of this thesis is to carry out an investigation to identify optimum solutions for a range of nanophotonic applications. We explore several areas of applications where metasurface based designs have gained significant traction by the scientific community and identify cases where metasurface will be useful and where conventional optical approaches are a better choice.