Plasmonic excitations in unusual materials: doped semiconductors and topological insulators

The fields of plasmonics and metamaterials have seen significant growth in recent years, due to the interest in confining light to subwavelength volumes both for fundamental physics studies as well as novel device architectures. Much of this work has been done in the visible spectral range with traditional metals such as gold and silver. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work using newmaterials, specifically heavily-doped InAs grown by molecular beam epitaxy, for mid-infraredplasmonic and metamaterial devices. I will explain the advantages of these new materials over traditional plasmonic materials in the infrared and demonstrate that they act as near-perfect Drude metals with tunable optical propertieswhich can also be integrated with existing semiconductor optoelectronic devices. I will then show new results on semiconductor infrared metamaterials, which exhibit negative refraction. I will close by discussing some recent work using other materials, including topological insulators grown by molecular beam epitaxy for the far-infrared