Bifunctional plasmonic metamaterials enabled by subwavelength nano-notches for broadband, polarization-independent enhanced optical transmission and passive beam-steering.

In this work, we present the design, numerical experiments, and analysis of a plasmonic metamaterial thin film based on subwavelength nano-notch loaded modified fishnet structures. The resulting device offers a simultaneous bandpass filtering functionality with a broad enhanced optical transmission window and a gapless negative-zero-positive index transition to enable polarization-independent passive beam-steering. This unique characteristic is made possible by the introduced subwavelength nano-notches, which provide fine tuning and hybridization of the external and internal surface plasmon polariton modes. This allows tailoring of the dispersive properties of the plasmonic metamaterial for broadband operation. Specifically, a multilayer nanostructured modified fishnet with feature sizes accessible by modern nanofabrication techniques is presented, exhibiting a broad passband at the mid-infrared wavelengths from 3.0 to 3.7 µm and stopbands elsewhere in the 2.5 ~4.5 µm window. The transmittance normalized to area is around 3 dB within the broad 20% bandwidth of the passband. Additionally, the effective index undergoes a smooth transition from negative unity through zero to positive unity with low loss within the passband. The physical mechanism and the angular dispersion of the metamaterial are analyzed in detail. Finally, full-wave simulations of a prism formed from this metamaterial are performed to demonstrate that the proposed structure achieves simultaneous polarization-insensitive passive beam-steering and filtering functionalities.