Applied Nanophotonics, Liquid Crystals and Biomedical Optics

Light manipulation with metamaterial structures is a topic of utmost importance in many fields such as medical diagnostics, monitoring of industrial fabrication processes, environmental and agricultural monitoring, food inspection, sensing of hazardous materials, remote sensing in air and water, night vision, optical communications, integrated quantum photonics, microscopy, solar energy efficient conversion, water desalination, and much more. However, the existing devices often suffer from low speed, narrow dynamic range, wide uncontrolled bandwidth, low light throughput, and the majority are bulky and expensive. A device that combines all these quality parameters does not exist. The recent advances in nanofabrication, photonics, materials science and engineering, electromagnetic simulation tools, algorithms, and computing power, give us extra degrees of freedom to resolve this problem by better understanding and controlling the optical properties of materials and photonic structures. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the status of photonic metamaterials (PMMs) research in three main fields: tunable PMMs in particular with liquid crystals, perfect broadband absorption PMM structures for solar energy conversion, and chemical or biosensing using surface plasmon resonance and surface-enhanced spectroscopies.