Multi-hierarchical amorphous metamaterials

用自下而上的方法制造和利用自组织机制制造的超材料将使新的应用成为可能。它们将用自上而下的技术完美地补充过去制造的超材料。这些材料对证明许多基本和突破性的性能起到了决定性作用，但它们只是对所有设备的边际用途，因为确实需要大量材料。然而，在新生的自组装超材料领域，在大多数情况下，人们对孤立的元原子感兴趣；或者至多，元原子被充分稀释，以至于任何相互作用都可以被忽略。为了观察实现功能器件所必需的色散效应，需要取消这一限制。迫切需要由密集排列的元原子组成的材料，其中元原子之间的耦合是显著的。自组织自下而上的超材料是元原子之间的重要耦合，但从未被研究过。如果最终能够在单个元原子之间的相互作用中实现强耦合机制，一种在纳米尺度驯服光的全新方法将会出现。它将实现新的功能，在这些功能中，非线性效应可以得到数量级的增强，出现强烈的手性响应，或者光谱响应可以在非常窄的频率空间内突然变化。提出这个项目建议的合作伙伴都有各自的和互补的专业知识。然而，他们提供的专业知识必须结合起来，才能实现应用程序中制定和描述的目标。在这个跨学科的项目中，我们希望设计、制造和表征自组装的自下而上的超材料的远场和近场的线性和非线性特性。我们将设计选定的应用程序，以证明在纳米尺度上对光-物质相互作用进行前所未有的控制的前景。

Metamaterials made with bottom-up approaches and fabricated while exploiting mechanisms of self-organisation would enable novel applications. They would perfectly complement metamaterials fabricated in the past with top-down technologies. These materials were decisive to prove many basic and groundbreaking properties, but they are only of marginal use for all devices were truly bulk materials are required. In the nascent field of self-assembled metamaterials, however, in most cases isolated meta-atoms were of interest; or at most meta-atoms sufficiently diluted such that any interaction could have been neglected. To observe the dispersive effects necessary to achieve functional devices, this limitation needs to be lifted. Materials are urgently required that consist of densely packed meta-atoms where the coupling among meta-atoms is significantly. Self-organized bottom-up metamaterials were the coupling among meta-atoms is important have never been studied. If eventually a strong coupling regime in the interaction among individual meta-atoms can be achieved, an entire new approach to tame light at the nanoscale will emerge. It will allow novel functionalities, where nonlinear effects can be enhanced by orders of magnitude, where a strong chiral response emerges or where the spectral response can change abruptly across a very narrow frequency space. The partners that came together to suggest this project all have an individual and complementary expertise. The expertise they provide, however, has to be combined to reach the goals formulated and described in the application. In this interdisciplinary project we wish to design, to fabricate, and to characterize in the far- and in the near-field the linear and nonlinear properties of self-assembled bottom-up metamaterials. We will engineer selected applications to prove the promise of an unprecedented control over light-matter interaction at the nanoscale.