Inverse Design of Optical Metamaterials Assembled from Plasmonic Nanoparticles
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Self-assembly of strongly coupled plasmonic nanoparticles is a scalable and promising route for producing optical metamaterials with emergent photonic properties. Understanding, controlling, and designing the light-matter interactions of these components is crucial to improving their performance. In this paper, we formulate optical metamaterials design as an inverse problem, where we first specify a target optical behavior and then use numerical optimization to autonomously discover self-assembled nanoparticle metamaterials possessing the desired features. We use a coupled dipole method for electromagnetic simulation to efficiently compute gradients of optical figures of merit with respect to nanoparticle position, size, and parameters of the dielectric function analytically for gradient-based iterative optimization. Our design framework rapidly iterates through candidate materials self-assembled from tens of thousands of nanoparticles, and specifies the position, size, dielectric properties, and other physical features of each nanoparticle within an optimal metamaterial, subject to arbitrary constraints on the choices of design parameters. We use our tool to perform simulated annealing optimization to propose nanoparticles metamaterials with optical features tunable over an enormous range. In particular, we have inverse designed nanoparticle metamaterials with: 1) tunable extinction spectra of complex lineshape and 2) electric nearfield intensity with spatial profiles matching targeted patterns. By examining libraries of metamaterials with similar optical features, we can describe the key structure-property relations governing their optical responses.
Source: ChemRxiv
Authors: Rishabh Sanghavi, Zachary M. Sherman
Institution: University of Washington
Language: English
Field: Materials Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222280711