| Extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) was discovered by Ebbesen, when he ob- served that an unexpectedly large amount of light was transmitted through sub wave- length hole arrays perforated in thin metal films. Since then, metamaterials gained much interest due to their extraordinary electromagnetic properties. Such properties include light concentration, directing and filtering of light, light trapping, surface plasmons (SPs), and photon sorting. In this work, we study ways of controlling light in metamaterials especially for spatial light sorting, namely, using waveguide cavity modes (WCMs), dispersion engineering of surface plasmons (SPs), and photon sorting techniques. We will discuss methods for using such properties by investigating (1) compound aperture arrays (CAAs) that support the extraordinary light circulation and concentration of s- and p-polarized phase resonance, (2) multilayer structures, composed of metal-like materials, in which one controls the SPs field distributions, and (3) metal-insulator-metal (MIM) configurations that support the multi-band photon sorting.;Compound aperture arrays (CAAs) have recently been studied quite extensively due to the fact that these structures can exhibit extraordfinary optical transmission (EOT). These unusual optical properties that are compelling because of the optical physics involved and because of numerous potential devices such as sensors, polarization and wavelength filters, high finesse optical filters, and light trapping, concentrating and guiding structures.;Multilayer structures that are composed of metal-like materials can be engineered to manipulate the distribution of the EM fields in the system such that the complex shape of surface plasmons (SPs) dispersion curves can be designed. Because of this benefit, the spatial SP sortng is possible at desired frequencies and momenta, especially in the doped oxide materials in the near-IR and visible ranges. Applications include tunable broad-band perfect absorbers, band-stop filters, solar cells, slow light and buffering in telecommunication systems, stopping, trapping, fasting light effect.;Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) configurations that support the multi-band photon sorting are studied analytically, numerically, and experimentally. SP-enabled IR photodetectors are realized as the incident EM field is being spatially sorted in according to different operating wavelengths in metasurfaces. In this work, for the first time, we investigate and compare the use of c-HgCdTe and a-HgCdTe for the photon sorting metasurfaces in near, mid, and long IR spectral range in the sensor applications and present the proof-of-concept device using a silicon nitride film as it has similar optical properties with a MCT film. The SP-enabled metamaterial detector can lower the active volume in the detecting component that can further increase the operat- ing temperature while preserving a high quantum efficiency (QE) and broad spectral band. |
