Effectiveness of Thin Films in Lieu of Hyperbolic Metamaterials in the Near Field

We show that the near-field functionality of hyperbolic metamaterials (HMM), typically proposed for increasing the photonic local density of states (LDOS), can be achieved with thin metal films. Although HMMs have an infinite density of internally propagating plane-wave states, the external coupling...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Miller, Owen D. (Contributor), Johnson, Steven G. (Contributor), Rodriguez, Alejandro W. (Author)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society, 2014-05-01T17:08:42Z.
Subjects:
Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Miller, Owen D.  |e author 
100 1 0 |a Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Johnson, Steven G.  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Miller, Owen D.  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Johnson, Steven G.  |e contributor 
700 1 0 |a Johnson, Steven G.  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Rodriguez, Alejandro W.  |e author 
245 0 0 |a Effectiveness of Thin Films in Lieu of Hyperbolic Metamaterials in the Near Field 
260 |b American Physical Society,   |c 2014-05-01T17:08:42Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86335 
520 |a We show that the near-field functionality of hyperbolic metamaterials (HMM), typically proposed for increasing the photonic local density of states (LDOS), can be achieved with thin metal films. Although HMMs have an infinite density of internally propagating plane-wave states, the external coupling to nearby emitters is severely restricted. We show analytically that properly designed thin films, of thicknesses comparable to the metal size of a hyperbolic metamaterial, yield an LDOS as high as (if not higher than) that of HMMs. We illustrate these ideas by performing exact numerical computations of the LDOS of multilayer HMMs, along with their application to the problem of maximizing near-field heat transfer, to show that single-layer thin films are suitable replacements in both cases. 
520 |a Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Contract W911NF-07-D0004) 
546 |a en_US 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Physical Review Letters