Optical metamaterials understood as materials including sub-wavelength structures will be essential for the building of the next generation of photonic devices. These metamaterials will have functionalities such as emission, switching/processing and detection of light and will operate in a wide wavelength range, from the UV to the NIR. These effective meta-functionalities can be achieved by suitably assembling active nanoscale structures with different functionalities in a single host element.
I will present the methodology that we have developed in my group in order to build metamaterials based in the concept of embedding nano-scale objects into thin film oxides. By suitably choosing the nature/composition, morphology and size of these nanoscale objects, thin films with specific functional responses have been obtained. In this presentation I will show and discuss some examples of our recent work that includes an efficient nano-hybrid NIR emitter and a non-conventional plasmonic switch operating in the visible.