Understanding of increased diffuse scattering in regular arrays of fluctuating resonant particles (Presentation Recording)

In this presentation we will discuss the analytical and numerical approaches to modeling electromagnetic properties of geometrically regular subwavelength 2D arrays of random resonant plasmonic particles. Amorphous metamaterials and metasurfaces attract interest of the scientific community due to promising technological implementations with cost-efficient methods of large-scale chemical nanoparticles synthesis as well as their self-organization. Random fluctuations of the particles size, shape, and/or composition are inevitable not only in the bottom-up synthesis, but also in conventional electron beam and photolithography fabrication. Despite the significant progress in large-scale fabrication, modeling and effective properties prediction of random/amorphous metamaterials and metasurfaces is still a challenge, which we address here. We present our results on analytical modelling of metasurfaces with regular periodic arrangements of resonant nanoparticles of random polarizability/size/material at normal plane-wave incidence. We show that randomness of the polarizability is related to increase in diffused scattering and we relate this phenomenon to a modification of the dipoles’ interaction constant. As a result, we obtain a simple analytical formula which describes diffuse scattering in such amorphous metasurfaces. Employing the supercell approach we numerically confirm the analytical results. The proposed approach can be easily extended from electrical dipole arrays and normal wave incidence to more general cases of electric and magnetic resonant particles and oblique incidence.