Search

Controlled charge flows are fundamental to many areas of science and technology, serving as carriers of energy and information, as probes of material properties and dynamics, and as a means of revealing or even inducing broken symmetries. Emerging methods for light-based current control offer promising routes beyond the speed and adaptability limitations of conventional voltage-driven systems. However, optical generation and manipulation of currents at nanometer spatial scales remains a basic challenge and a crucial step towards scalable optoelectronic systems for microelectronics and information science. Here, we introduce vectorial optoelectronic metasurfaces in which ultrafast light pulses induce local directional charge flows around symmetry-broken plasmonic nanostructures, with tunable responses and arbitrary patterning down to sub-diffractive nanometer scales. Local symmetries and vectorial current distributions are revealed by polarization- and wavelength-sensitive electrical readout and terahertz (THz) emission, while spatially-tailored global currents are demonstrated in the direct generation of elusive broadband THz vector beams. We show that in graphene, a detailed interplay between electrodynamic, thermodynamic, and hydrodynamic degrees of freedom gives rise to rapidly-evolving nanoscale driving forces and charge flows under extreme temporal and spatial confinement. These results set the stage for versatile patterning and optical control over nanoscale currents in materials diagnostics, THz spectroscopies, nano-magnetism, and ultrafast information processing.

Intracellular access with high spatiotemporal resolution can enhance our understanding of how neurons or cardiomyocytes regulate and orchestrate network activity, and how this activity can be affected with pharmacology or other interventional modalities. Nanoscale devices often employ electroporation to transiently permeate the cell membrane and record intracellular potentials, which tend to decrease rapidly to extracellular potential amplitudes with time. Here, we report innovative scalable, vertical, ultra-sharp nanowire arrays that are individually addressable to enable long-term, native recordings of intracellular potentials. We report large action potential amplitudes that are indicative of intracellular access from 3D tissue-like networks of neurons and cardiomyocytes across recording days and that do not decrease to extracellular amplitudes for the duration of the recording of several minutes. Our findings are validated with cross-sectional microscopy, pharmacology, and electrical interventions. Our experiments and simulations demonstrate that individual electrical addressability of nanowires is necessary for high-fidelity intracellular electrophysiological recordings. This study advances our understanding of and control over high-quality multi-channel intracellular recordings, and paves the way toward predictive, high-throughput, and low-cost electrophysiological drug screening platforms., Comment: Main manuscript: 33 pages, 4 figures, Supporting information: 43 pages, 27 figures, Submitted to Advanced Materials

Solar energy promises a viable solution to meet the ever-increasing power demand by providing a clean, renewable energy alternative to fossil fuels. For solar thermophotovoltaics (STPV), high-temperature absorbers and emitters with strong spectral selectivity are imperative to efficiently couple solar radiation into photovoltaic cells. Here, we demonstrate refractory metasurfaces for STPV with tailored absorptance and emittance characterized by in-situ high-temperature measurements, featuring thermal stability up to at least 1200 C. Our tungsten-based metasurface absorbers have close-to-unity absorption from visible to near infrared and strongly suppressed emission at longer wavelengths, while our metasurface emitters provide wavelength-selective emission spectrally matched to the band-edge of InGaAsSb photovoltaic cells. The projected overall STPV efficiency is as high as 18% when employing a fully integrated absorber/emitter metasurface structure, much higher than those achievable by stand-alone PV cells. Our work opens a path forward for high-performance STPV systems based on refractory metasurface structures., Comment: Preprint, 31 pages, 5 figures, 5 supporting figures

We demonstrate the active tuning of all-dielectric metasurfaces exhibiting high-quality factor (high-Q) resonances. The active control is provided by embedding the asymmetric silicon meta-atoms with liquid crystals, which allows the relative index of refraction to be controlled through heating. It is found that high quality factor resonances ($Q=270\pm30$) can be tuned over more than three resonance widths. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using all-dielectric metasurfaces to construct tunable narrow-band filters., Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures