Dynamically self-assembled silver nanoparticles as a thermally tunable metamaterial

The availability of metamaterials with properties that can be actively tuned is crucial for the future development of various metamaterial-based technologies. Here we show that by using silver nanoparticles equipped with a thermally responsive organic coating a metamaterial is obtained with reversibly switchable properties. The material investigated exhibits dynamic self-assembly resulting from temperature-dependent changes of organic coating shape, which translates to a switchable spatial distribution of the silver nanoparticles. This in turn strongly influences the optical properties of the entire material. The measured optical characteristics of the material are in excellent agreement with theoretical calculations, which allow us to use the latter to predict a dynamically tunable epsilon-near-zero behaviour of the metamaterial. The suggested methodology opens new routes for tunable metamaterials that operate in the visible region and will enable various applications for soft-matter-based optical devices.