[INVITED] Self-assembled optical metamaterials

• Trends in self-assembled optical metamaterials described.
• Figures of merit describing self-assembled metamaterials are presented.
• Self-Assembled metamaterials realizations are described.

Self-assembled metamaterials constitute a promising platform to achieving bulk and homogenous optical materials that exhibit unusual effective medium properties. For many years now, the research community has contemplated lithographically fabricated metasurfaces, with extraordinary optical features. However, achieving large volumes at low cost is still a challenge by top-down fabrication. Bottom-up fabrication, that relies both on nanochemistry and self-assembly, is capable of building such materials while greatly reducing the energy footprint in the formulation of the metamaterial. Self-assembled metamaterials have shown that they are capable of reaching unprecedented values of bulkiness and homogeneity figures of merit. This feat is achieved by synthesizing plasmonic nanoresonators (meta-atoms in the sense of artificial polarizable units) and assembling them into a fully three-dimensional matrix through a variety of methods. Furthermore it has been shown that a wide range of material parameters can be tailored by controlling the geometry and composition of the meta-atoms as well as the volume fraction of the nano-objects in the metamaterial. Here we conduct a non-comprehensive review of some of the recent trends in self-assembled optical metamaterials and illustrate these trends with our recent work.