Complex metamaterials: how I learned to stop worrying and love disorder

Henning Galinski (Laboratory for Nanometallurgy, D-MATL)

Today, optical metamaterials and metasurfaces are produced using lithography techniques and typically cannot be scaled above the gram level. In addition, the optical response of metamaterials is often designed for a specific polarization, which makes them unsuitable for many real-world applications using unpolarized light.

Here, I will discuss two new approaches to design scalable but disordered metamaterials, whose properties go beyond the effective medium limit. I will chart a course how these two approaches can be used in real world applications, e.g. for energy conversion.

Overview Materials Colloquium 2019