We report the possibility of achieving normal-incidence transmission at non-normal incidence angles using thin interfaces made of metasurface structures with an appropriately-designed positive spatial phase distributions. The reported effect represents a consequence of generalized reflection and refraction, which, although having been studied for discovering exotic effects such as negative refraction, to the best of our knowledge fails to address normal incidence conditions in positive phase distribution and its underlying consequences. Normal-incidence conditions can be angle-tuned by modifying the vales of the phase distribution gradients. Furthermore, for configurations around the normal-incidence angles, the metasurface will exhibit a bifunctional behavior—either divergent or convergent. All these properties are essential for applications such as optical guiding in integrated optics, wave front sensing devices, polarization controllers, wave front-to-polarization converters, holographic sensors, and spatially-resolved polarization measurement.

This paper studies the effective dielectric properties of heterogeneous materials of the type particle inclusions in a host medium, using the Maxwell Garnet and the Bruggeman theory. The results of the theories are applied at polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) films, nanoparticles (NP)-doped LCs, and developed for NP-doped PDLC films. The effective permittivity of the composite was simulated at sufficiently high frequency, where the permittivity is constant, obtaining results on its dependency on the constituents’ permittivity and concentrations. The two models are compared and discussed. The method used for simulating the doped PDLC retains its general character and can be applied for other similar multiphase composites. The methods can be used to calculate the effective permittivity of a LC composite, or, in the case of a composite in which one of the phases has an unknown permittivity, to extract it from the measured composite permittivity. The obtained data are necessary in the design of the electrical circuits.

We report simulations on the spectral behavior of non-layered gold-silicon and all-silicon frequency-selective metasurfaces in an asymmetric element configuration in the mid-infrared spectral window of 5–5.8 $\mathsf{\mu }$m. The non-layered layout is experimentally feasible due to recent technological advances such as nano-imprint and nano-stencil lithography, and the spectral window was chosen due to the multitude of applications in sensing and imaging. The architecture exhibits significant resonance in the window of interest as well as extended tunability by means of variation of cell element sizes and relative coordinates. The results indicate that the proposed metasurface architecture is a viable candidate for mid-infrared absorbers, sensors and imaging systems.

Electro-optical devices that work in a similar fashion as PDLCs (polymer-dispersed liquid crystals), produced from cellulose acetate (CA) electrospun fibers deposited onto indium tin oxide coated glass and a nematic liquid crystal (E7), were studied. CA and the CA/liquid crystal composite were characterized by multiple investigation techniques, such as polarized optical microscopy, dielectric spectroscopy and impedance measurements. Dielectric constant and electric energy loss were studied as a function of frequency and temperature. The activation energy was evaluated and the relaxation time was obtained by fitting the spectra of the dielectric loss with the Havriliak–Negami functions. To determine the electrical characteristics of the studied samples, impedance measurements results were treated using the Cole–Cole diagram and the three-element equivalent model.