Active Plasmonics and Lossless Metamaterials

金属表面可以支持所谓的表面等离子体，自由电子的密度波。这些等离子体波可以与光相互作用，开辟了一个新的光学领域，即等离子体。当金属表面是纳米结构时，真正的纳米级光学的可能性就出现了。在这项工作中，我们的目标是减轻甚至消除不可避免的吸收损失所造成的金属放大等离子体波与半导体量子威尔斯和点，从而证明低损耗等离子体元件。它们将通过在项目期间开发的新型电磁仿真方法设计，在超级计算机集群上运行。我们还将使用这种方法来设计和制造新型宽带低损耗甚至无损的超材料，具有负折射率的非常有前途的结构，例如可以减缓甚至阻止入射光脉冲。

Metal surfaces can support so called surface plasmons, density waves of free electrons. These plasmon waves can interact with light, opening the way to a novel area of optics, namely plasmonics. When the metal surface is nanostructured, a possibility for true nanoscale optics emerges. In this work we aim to alleviate or even remove the unavoidable absorption losses caused by the metal by amplifying the plasmon waves with semiconductor quantum wells and dots, thus demonstrating low-loss plasmonic components. They will be designed by novel electromagnetic simulation methods developed during the project, running on a supercomputer cluster. We will also use this approach to design and fabricate novel wide-band low-loss or even lossless metamaterials, highly promising structures with a negative refractive index that can for example slow or even stop incoming light pulses.