Liquid crystal metamaterials

Metamaterials are exotic systems with properties not encountered (or inaccessible) in nature. They exhibit unconventional behavior in optical properties due to the arrangement of their constituent elemental structures or ‘meta – atoms’. Thus these systems exhibit path- breaking and cutting edge phenomena like sub-wavelength resolution, invisibility cloaking etc. Due to the limitations of conventional top fabrication techniques like e-beam lithography, and focused ion beam milling nano imprinting soft metamaterials are a viable alternative. These soft metamaterial systems, gain advantage apart from the low cost fabrication techniques of self assembly and tunablity.

Liquid crystal metamaterials gain from their anisotropic behaviour along with their soft stimuli responsiveness. We are currently investigating liquid crystal materials with chiral plasmonic nanostructures to explore the possibility of finding metamaterial properties.

Posted by Geetha Nair