ering Ph.D. graduate from UC San Diego and the first author of this work. Riley is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Sirbuly’s group.
|SEM images of a nanotube array: side view (left) and top view (right)|
Those are just a few exciting features of this particle-based design, researchers said. It’s also potentially transferrable to any type of substrate and can be scaled up to make large surface area devices, like broadband absorbers for large windows. “Nanomaterials normally aren’t fabricated at scales larger than a couple centimeters, so this would be a big step in that direction,” Sirbuly said.
The technology is still at the developmental stage. Liu and Sirbuly’s teams are continuing to work together to explore different materials, geometries and designs to develop absorbers that work at different wavelengths of light for various applications.
Full paper: “Near-perfect broadband absorption from hyperbolic metamaterial nanoparticles.” Authors of the study are Conor T. Riley, Joseph S. T. Smalley, Jeffrey R. J. Brodie, Yeshaiahu Fainman, Donald J. Sirbuly and Zhaowei Liu.