journal article·2025-02

Electrochemically mutable soft metasurfaces

Siddharth Doshi, Anqi Ji, Ali I. Mahdi, Scott T. Keene, Skyler P. Selvin, Philippe Lalanne, Eric A. Appel, Nicholas A. Melosh, Mark L. Brongersma

Nature Materials· Volume 24· Issue 2
Publisher page

Abstract

Active optical metasurfaces, capable of dynamically manipulating light in ultrathin form factors, enable novel interfaces between humans and technology. In such interfaces, soft materials bring many advantages based on their flexibility, compliance and large stimulus-driven responses. Here, we create electrochemically mutable, soft metasurfaces that capitalize on the swelling of soft conducting polymers to alter the shape and associated resonant response of metasurface elements. Such geometric tuning overcomes the typical trade-off between achieving substantial tuning and low optical loss that is intrinsic to dynamic metasurfaces relying on index tuning of materials. Using the commercial polymer PEDOT:PSS, we demonstrate dynamic, high-resolution colour tuning and high-diffraction-efficiency (>19%) beam-steering devices that operate at CMOS-compatible voltages (~1.5 V). These results highlight how the deformability of soft materials can enable a class of high-performance metasurfaces that are suitable for body-worn technologies.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Advanced Memory and Neural Computing · Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence · Advanced Sensor and Energy Harvesting Materials

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

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