Yinhui Kan - Metamaterials for Manipulation of Thermal Radiation and Photoluminescence in Near and Far Fields

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This thesis provides a series of methods for flexibly and actively manipulating thermal emission and photoluminance by advanced nanostructuresmetamaterials. Although there are tens of thousands of materials in nature, sometimes it is still very hard to find a specific material with the permittivity simultaneously satisfying the requirements in both spatial positions and frequency regions. To address this issue, nanostructures in subwavelength scales have been introduced to precisely modulate lightmatter interactions and then tailorize both thermal radiations and photon emissions. This thesis explores methods for designing different kinds of nanostructure, including multilayers, gratings, nanoridges, and waveguides, to improve the flexibility and functionality of micro/nanodevices.

In the far-field, two different thermal absorbers, consisting of multilayers and gratings, have been proposed for achieving broadband near-perfect absorption in the visible, near-infrared range, and mid-infrared range, respectively. In the near-field, a formalism for calculating the near-field thermal radiation in three-body systems with periodic structures has been developed and further demonstrated a larger heat transfer rate than that in two-grating and three-slab counterparts. Moreover, the results show that the asymmetric regimes of the modulator can provide a large tunability for the near-field thermal performance of the proposed three-body systems.

Furthermore, in terms of manipulation of nonclassical light emission from quantum emitters (QEs), metasurfaces consisting of nanoridges have been first designed to change the polarization and direction of photon emission, which is the first time as far as we know for realizing spinning single photons in the room temperature without strong magnific field. It also demonstrated that the hybrid plasmon-QE coupled metasurfaces have the ability for facilitating the phase matching of QE-excited circularly diverging SPPs and realize a well-collimated off-normal propagating photon steam. Moreover, a dielectric-loaded plasmonic nanocircuit consisting of an achiral spinorbit coupler has been proposed and realized for unidirectional routing of pump radiation into branched QE-integrated waveguides. The proposed methods together with designed metamaterials open new avenues for designing novel micro/nanodevices or systems for promising applications like thermal energy harvesting, detecting, sensing, and on-chip quantum-optical networks.

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my advisor Prof. Changying Zhao for his persistent guidance, support, and tutorship in my research career at SJTU. When I joined the group five years ago as a fresh graduate student, I was totally unfamiliar with micro/nanothermal radiation, and it was Prof. Zhao who brought me to this fantastic field. He taught me how to think critically and independently, which is very crucial for proposing, conducting, and finishing these interesting research works. Without him, this dissertation would not have been possible.