Near-perfect molecular absorption enabled by critical coupling in metamaterial.

The absorption and emission spectrum arising from the vibrational motion of a molecule is mostly in the infrared region. These fingerprint absorptions of polar bonds enable us to acquire bond-specific chemical information from specimens. However, the mode mismatch between the atomic-scale dimensions of the chemical bonds and the resonance wavelength limits the direct detection of tiny amounts of samples such as self-assembled monolayers or biological membranes.

Experimental observation of Berreman modes in an uniaxial anisotropic nanoporous alumina film on aluminum substrate.

In this Letter, we demonstrate experimentally and verify numerically the excitation of Berreman modes that propagate in a dielectric film of uniaxial anisotropic nanoporous alumina grown on an aluminum substrate. It is an air-dielectric-metal asymmetric polaritonic system with a real part of the effective permittivity having a value near zero. The modes are excited at a wavelength lower than the epsilon-near-zero wavelength region.

Anisotropic metamaterial optical fibers.

Internal physical structure can drastically modify the properties of waveguides: photonic crystal fibers are able to confine light inside a hollow air core by Bragg scattering from a periodic array of holes, while metamaterial loaded waveguides for microwaves can support propagation at frequencies well below cutoff. Anisotropic metamaterials assembled into cylindrically symmetric geometries constitute light-guiding structures that support new kinds of exotic modes. A microtube of anodized nanoporous alumina, with nanopores radially emanating from the inner wall to the outer surface, is a manifestation of such an anisotropic metamaterial optical fiber.