Near-infrared metamaterial films with reconfigurable transmissive/ reflective properties

A near-infrared metamaterial design that is reconfigurable between almost completely transmissive and reflective states is presented. The reconfiguration is enabled by tuning the anisotropic nematic liquid crystals used as a spacer layer between two silver nanoplates in a planar doubly periodic metamaterial. The design is optimized for maximum difference in transmittance between the two states by using a genetic algorithm. For a linearly polarized illumination at normal incidence, full-wave electromagnetic analysis predicts that the optimized metamaterial film can change the transmittance between 98.7% and 0.1% at a wavelength of 1.1 μm.