School of Physics Colloquium Series: Dr. Wenshan Cai, Georgia Tech, College of Engineering

Metamaterials are commonly viewed as artificially-structured media capable of realizing arbitrary effective parameters, in which metals and dielectrics are delicately combined to facilitate the index contrast and plasmonic response required for a particular purpose. We aim to drive beyond this limited vision and explore the use of optical metamaterials as a generalizable platform for optoelectronic information technology: Metals will provide tailored plasmonic behavior as before, but will serve double duty by providing electrical functions including voltage input, carrier injection/extraction, and heat sinking, and dielectrics will consist of functional elements such as Kerr materials, electrooptic polymers, and p-n junctions. In this talk I will discuss our preliminary results on several topics in this category, including the electrically induced harmonic generation and optical rectification of light in a perfect metamaterial absorber, the nonlinear spectroscopy and imaging from a chiral metamaterial, and the backward phase-matching in an optical metamaterial where the fundamental and frequency-doubled waves possess opposite indices of refraction.