Much of optics in the ballistic regime is about designing devices to mold the flow of light. This task is accomplished via specific spatial distributions of the refractive index or the refractive-index tensor. For light propagating in turbid media, a corresponding design approach has not been applied previously. Here, we review our corresponding recent work in which we design spatial distributions of the light diffusivity or the light-diffusivity tensor to accomplish specific tasks. As an application, we realize cloaking of metal contacts on large-area OLEDs, eliminating the contacts’ shadows, thereby homogenizing the diffuse light emission. In more detail, metal contacts on large-area organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are mandatory electrically, but they cast optical shadows, leading to unwanted spatially inhomogeneous diffuse light emission. We show that the contacts can be made invisible either by (i) laminate metamaterials designed by coordinate transformations of the diffusion equation or by (ii) triangular-shaped regions with piecewise constant diffusivity, hence constant concentration of scattering centers. These structures are post-optimized in regard to light throughput by Monte-Carlo ray-tracing simulations and successfully validated by model experiments.

Date Published: 9 November 2016
PDF: 1 pages
Proc. SPIE 9918, Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2016, 99181K (9 November 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2235626

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9918:
Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2016
Nader Engheta; Mikhail A. Noginov; Nikolay I. Zheludev, Editor(s)