The Photonic Materials Cloud - Designing, Comparing, and Testing Photonics Materials Online: INVITED TALK

The fields of photonics and plasmonics have generated a long-standing interest, only accelerated in the past two decades due to advances in nanoscale fabrication and characterization. The optical response of different materials highly depends on the materials' optical properties, dimensions, and surroundings. These relations can be complex to understand for researchers getting into the subject and for experienced researchers who intend to examine and evaluate the impact of subtle differences in the material models while setting up experiments or getting a general overview. The Photonic Materials Cloud (PMCloud) [1] is a web-based, interactive tool for comparing optical material models from a database, experimental data input, and inline-generated materials, using various methods, including Drude-Lorentz parameters. PMCloud provides a fully interactive interface to assign materials, compare their subtle optical differences, and evaluate their performance in important (numerical) photonic experiments, such as the scattering by core-shell nanoparticles and multi-layer thin-film devices. This talk will introduce the PMClouds and demonstrate its applicability to state-of-the-art research questions, such as comparing novel plasmonic materials to classical metals like gold and silver and designing optical, dielectric, and metallic thin-film devices. PMCloud opens up a free and fast path to prototyping optical materials and simple fundamental devices, and it can serve as an educational platform for photonic materials research. [1] http://photonicmaterials.eu