A scalable nanofabrication technique for chiral metamaterials is presented, which combines the dynamic shadowing growth and self-assembled nanosphere monolayers, and is also known as nanosphere shadowing lithography. We have developed two strategies based on nanosphere shadowing lithography to prepare chiral nanostructures. The first strategy is to create a quasi-three-dimensional single-layer fan-shaped chiral nanostructure on nanospheres with one plasmonic material. The second strategy is to create three-dimensional multi-layers helical nanostructures with one plasmonic material and one dielectric material. Both strategies can produce large-area chiral nanostructures with strong chiral optical response, which makes nanosphere shadowing lithography suitable for producing chiral metamaterial based devices such as an ultrathin narrow-band circular polarizer.

Date Published: 26 September 2016
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9929, Nanostructured Thin Films IX, 99290B (26 September 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2236351

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9929:
Nanostructured Thin Films IX
Akhlesh Lakhtakia; Tom G. Mackay; Motofumi Suzuki, Editor(s)