Book Description

Abstract : Advancement in fabrication technology made it possible to integrated different materials such as metals, dielectrics and semiconductors in a nano-meter scale structure. The capability of making features in the same order or even smaller than wavelength of light, visible and infrared, brought us the opportunity to manipulate light in a capacity which was not possible before. During the last decade, researches introduced several designs to address some of human's dreams, such as making huge object invisible and bringing small particles to human's eye sight. This dissertation presents three different nano-structures with exotic optical properties. The first one is a low loss negative index lens (NIL). The NIL is claimed to have the capability for sub-diffraction imaging, however power dissipation prevented from any realization of the NIL. We developed a method, called plasmon injection scheme, to compensate for power dissipation in the NIL with coherent injection of surface plasmon polariton (SPP). Magneto-optical metamaterial (MOM) is the second nano-structure we introduce in this dissertation. The MOM which is consist of a background magneto-optical (MO) material and metallic inclusions, delivers an order of magnitude enhancement in the Faraday rotation compare to the background MO material. The diagonal elements of the effective permittivity tensor of the MOM could be tuned in such a way to increase the Faraday rotation. This design can potentially reduce the size of non-reciprocal optical devices which work based on the Faraday rotation. The last structure we introduce in this dissertation is a thin-film amorphous Silicon (a-Si) solar cell with a honeycomb silver mesh as the emitter layer. Low efficiency is main disadvantage of thin-film a-Si cells, and the honeycomb mesh increases the efficiency of the cell by enhancing the light absorption in the active layer and reducing the series resistance of the cell. The honeycomb mesh benefits from low cost and scalable nano-bead lithography technique. Our simulations verified a properly designed honeycomb thin-film a-Si solar cell delivers %8 more electric power at the output terminal.