With increasing demands to build devices that have a smaller footprint but operate at greater speeds, it is critical to develop materials with never-before-seen properties. These demands in performance are tied with developing nanofabrication techniques that are cheap and scalable in order to rapidly deploy these advanced materials into novel energy, communication and medical technologies. Metamaterial, a class of material that does not occur in nature, can possess exotic properties as determined by their periodic, organized structures rather than the intrinsic material properties of their individual units. However, fabricating metamaterials is often costly and time-consuming, thus requiring sophisticated tools to create periodic arrays of nanostructures with high precision. In this project, the Principal Investigator will partner with experts at Brookhaven National Laboratory to develop a low-cost solution-process technique to fabricate three-dimensional metamaterial (BNL). The goal is to use self-assembly, the natural process by which complex structures are put together, to arrange subunits of different nanostructures into a three-dimensional metamaterial, providing real-time insights on the environmental factors that modify this process. This highly interdisciplinary project provides education and training opportunities in the fields of photonics, nanofabrication and high-resolution microscopy, and enables graduate and undergraduate students from Alabama to conduct research at BNL. If successful, this project will offer a strategy to create metamaterial on a large scale, aligning with the Materials Genome Initiative's vision to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials in half the time and at a fraction of the cost.
The development of metamaterials has provided researchers an unpreceded way to achieve control over light-matter interaction, leading to exotic optical effects such as cloaking, superlensing and enhanced entangled photon generation. A critical step towards integrating metamaterials into energy-harvesting and sensing technologies is to develop nanofabrication methods that are low-cost and can be adapted for large-scale manufacturing. This project aims to develop a DNA-guided solution-processed strategy to fabricate hybrid three-dimensional metamaterials. The precise assembly of dissimilar nanostructures is achieved by selectively coating their surfaces with DNA to introduce directional bonding that can be programmed to self-assemble in a desired orientation. This allows high-quality crystalline nanostructures of different shapes (spheres, cubes or octahedrons) and materials (metal and dielectrics) to form into three-dimensional periodic arrangements of nanostructures. Since the intrinsic properties of an individual nanostructure or unit cell can be controlled, this provides a unique platform to understand how complex nanostructure assembly give rise to emerging optical phenomena, including nonlinear effects. A key part of this project is in situ linear and nonlinear optical experiments performed in a microfluidic reactor that can control the nanostructure-assembly microenvironment. By tuning the microenvironment, we will study how various electromagnetic modes couple and how to tune these various mechanisms with respect to each other. Furthermore, we will use full-field three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain electromagnetic solvers to model the optical properties of these hybrid metamaterial systems. If successful, the project will provide a route to fabricating metamaterials with exotic linear and/or nonlinear properties using solution-processed methods, which offer several advantages such as design flexibility, high-throughput, and the potentials for integration into ink-like or roll-to-roll printing.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
