Multifrequency superscattering from subwavelength hyperbolic structures

Superscattering, that is, a phenomenon of the scattering cross section from a subwavelength object exceeding the single-channel limit, has important prospects in enhanced sensing/spectroscopy, solar cells, and biomedical imaging. Superscattering can be typically constructed only at a single frequenc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Qian, Chao, Lin, Xiao, Yang, Yi, Gao, Fei, Shen, Yichen, Lopez, Josue, Kaminer, Ido, Zhang, Baile, Li, Erping, Soljačić, Marin, Chen, Hongsheng
Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/85189
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/50275
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Superscattering, that is, a phenomenon of the scattering cross section from a subwavelength object exceeding the single-channel limit, has important prospects in enhanced sensing/spectroscopy, solar cells, and biomedical imaging. Superscattering can be typically constructed only at a single frequency regime, and depends critically on the inescapable material losses. Under such realistic conditions, superscattering has not been predicted nor observed to exist simultaneously at multiple frequency regimes. Here we introduce multifrequency superscattering in a subwavelength hyperbolic structure, which can be made from artificial metamaterials or from naturally existing materials, such as hexagonal boron nitride (BN), and show the advantage of such hyperbolic materials for reducing structural complexity. The underlying mechanism is revealed to be the multimode resonances at multiple frequency regimes as appear in BN due to the peculiar dispersion of phonon-polaritons. Importantly, the multifrequency superscattering has a high tolerance to material losses and some structural variations, bringing the concept of multifrequency superscattering closer to useful and realistic conditions.