Resonant laser printing of bi-material metasurfaces: from plasmonic to photonic optical response

Metasurfaces are nanostructured surfaces with engineered optical properties - currently impacting many branches of optics, from miniaturization of optical components to realizing high-resolution structural colors. The optical properties of metasurfaces can be traced to the individual meta-atoms, which set the nature of the optical response, e.g., plasmonic for metallic meta-atoms or photonic for dielectric meta-atoms. Combining multiple types of responses opens up new horizons in design of optical materials, but has so far been avoided due to the fabrication difficulties associated with constructing a metasurface composed of several meta-atom materials. Here, we present a multi-material design approach by optically post-processing a metasurface constructed from self-assembled polystyrene spheres coated with silver. Using our concept of resonant laser printing, we locally alter the initial plasmonic response of the meta-atoms to a pure photonic response. Our work constitutes a conceptually different way of designing metasurfaces and can pave the way for realizing multi-material metasurfaces on large areas while being cost effective.