LUMILANT, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: As infrared (IR) electo-optical sensors improve in both availability and quality a strong

Description

As infrared (IR) electo-optical sensors improve in both availability and quality a strong need exists to have comparable improvements in the performance of military obscurants within the IR band. Conventional approaches for creating effective IR obscurants have relied primarily on shaped metal particles with high aspect ratios (e.g. rods, flakes). While efficient it is difficult to create very wideband or spectrally complex responses when using surface plasmon based metal particles. In this effort we will take a completely different approach towards the design of IR based obscurants. Instead of using metal particles we intend to explore the development of all dielectric obscurants that exploit the properties of photonic crystals with integrated nanocavities. We believe this approach can create highly reflective obscurant particles within an entire IR band. Moreover, by introducing defect modes we will show that it is possible to create single or multiple transparent windows within a wideband obscurant band. The all dielectric approach is also amenable to current nanofabrication methods as well as scalable nano-imprinting techniques that can be used to fabricate large quantities of obscurant at a reasonable cost.