Publications by authors named "Ashwin K Iyer"

In a reciprocal medium, transmission of electromagnetic (EM) waves is symmetric along opposite directions which restrict design and implementation of various systems in optics and photonics. Asymmetric transmission (AT) is essential for designing isolators and circulators in optics and photonics, and it benefits other applications such as photovoltaic systems, lasers, cloaking, and EM shielding. While bulky nonreciprocal devices based on magnetic field biases have been well known, creating AT in subwavelength structures is more challenging, and structures with a subwavelength thickness that show AT have drawn a lot of attention over the last decade.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In this paper, a new method for the wireless detection of liquid level is proposed by integrating a capacitive IDC-sensing element with a passive three-port RFID-sensing architecture. The sensing element transduces changes in the liquid level to corresponding fringe-capacitance variations, which alters the phase of the RFID backscattered signal. Variation in capacitance also changes the resonance magnitude of the sensing element, which is associated with a high phase transition.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Emerging electromagnetic inverse design methods have pushed nanofabrication methods to their limits to extract maximum performance from plasmonic aperture-based metasurfaces. Using plasmonic metamaterial-lined apertures as an example, we demonstrate the importance of fine nanowire and nanogap features for achieving strong miniaturization of plasmonic nanoapertures. Metamaterial-lined nanoapertures are miniaturized over bowtie nanoapertures with identical minimum feature sizes by a factor of 25% without loss of field enhancement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Surface-enhanced infrared spectroscopy is an important technique for improving the signal-to-noise ratio of spectroscopic material identification measurements in the mid-infrared fingerprinting region. However, the lower bound of the fingerprinting region receives much less attention due to a scarcity of transparent materials, more expensive sources, and weaker plasmonic effects. In this paper, we present a miniaturized metasurface unit cell for surface-enhanced infrared spectroscopy of the 15-[Formula: see text]m vibrational band of CO[Formula: see text].

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Meeting the evolving demands of plasmonics research requires increasingly precise control over surface plasmon properties, which necessitates extremely fine nanopatterning, complex geometries, and/or long-range order. Nanoplasmonic metasurfaces are representative of a modern research area requiring intricate, high-fidelity features reproduced over areas of several free-space wavelengths, making them one of the most challenging fabrication problems in the field today. This work presents a systematic study of the helium focused ion beam milling of gold for nanoplasmonic metasurface applications, using as its example a nanoplasmonic metasurface based on an array of nanometer-scale plasmonic-wire-loaded subwavelength apertures in a gold film.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We present a survey on battery-less Radio Frequency Identification (RFID-based wireless sensors that have emerged in the past several years. We discuss the evolution of RFID turning into wireless sensors. Moreover, we talk about different components of these battery-less RFID-based wireless sensors, five main topologies that transform a simple RFID chip into a battery-less wireless sensor, and state-of-the-art implementations of these topologies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Extraordinary transmission (ET) through a periodic array of subwavelength apertures on a perfect metallic screen has been studied extensively in recent years, and has largely been attributed to diffraction effects, for which the periodicity of the apertures, rather than their dimensions, dominates the response. The transmission properties of the apertures at resonance, on the other hand, are not typically considered 'extraordinary' because they may be explained using more conventional aperture-theoretical mechanisms. This work describes a novel approach for achieving ET in which subwavelength apertures are made to resonate by lining them using thin, epsilon-negative and near-zero (ENNZ) metamaterials.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Internal physical structure can drastically modify the properties of waveguides: photonic crystal fibers are able to confine light inside a hollow air core by Bragg scattering from a periodic array of holes, while metamaterial loaded waveguides for microwaves can support propagation at frequencies well below cutoff. Anisotropic metamaterials assembled into cylindrically symmetric geometries constitute light-guiding structures that support new kinds of exotic modes. A microtube of anodized nanoporous alumina, with nanopores radially emanating from the inner wall to the outer surface, is a manifestation of such an anisotropic metamaterial optical fiber.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF