Colloidal crystal engineering for programmable and stimuli-responsive optical metasurfaces and metamaterials

Metasurfaces and metamaterials emerged as promising nanophotonic material and device platforms to control light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. In such materials, the collective and effective optical response is dictated by individual building blocks and controlled by the geometrical parameters forming the crystal structure. I will introduce DNA-assembly of gold nanoparticles as a fabrication method to realize bottom-up, programmable, and stimuli-responsive nanophotonic hybrid metamaterials and metasurfaces. The ability to control the distance, size, shape, architecture of nanoparticles and overall crystal structure enables access to optical properties that are not accessible readily in nature. I will highlight wide range of functional nanophotonic device architectures including epsilon-near-zero metasurfaces, negative index metamaterials and broadband absorber meta-films. The synthesis of plasmonic NP architectures with structures and stimuli-responsive behavior that are not accessible in lithographically defined plasmonic nanostructures provides an opportunity to design materials with emergent optical properties that offer new fundamental insights.