Highly flexible near-infrared metamaterials

Plasmonic or metamaterial nanostructures are usually fabricated on rigid substrate i.e. glass, silicon. Optical functionality of such kinds of nanostructures is limited by the planar surface and thus sensitive to the incident angle of light. In this work, we demonstrated that a tri-layer flexible metamaterials working at near infrared (NIR) regime can be fabricated on transparent PET substrate using flip chip transfer (FCT) technique. FCT technique is solution-free and can also be applied to fabricate other functional nanostructures device on flexible substrate. We demonstrated NIR metamaterial device can be transformed into various shapes by bending the PET substrate. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America