Large Area, Highly-Flexible Metamaterials for Potential Application in Organic Electronics

Most of the current optical metamaterial nanostructures are fabricated on rigid substrates, and the conventional processes are very slow if the substrate size is limited. This invention introduces a laser interference lithography technique for the fabrication of flexible metamaterial or plasmonic nanostructure in a large area, which has potential applications such as imaging and environmental sensors.

• This invention provides a novel multilayer flexible metamaterial that can be fabricated using flip chip transfer (FCT) technique. This technique is different from other similar techniques such as metal lift-off process, which fabricates the nanostructures directly onto the flexible substrate or nanometer printing technique.

• High throughput & production yield
• Cost-effective for large-scale production

• The invention has wide applications such as tunable sensors and emitters, and gas sensors.
• Because of its high flexibility, the metamaterial or plasmonic sensor can be conformed into different shapes. For example, toxic gas leakage can be detected by a sensor in a small pipe in an enclosed and tight area.

• US Patent No. US 9,610,754
• US Patent No. US 9,227,383