Roadmap on Nonlocality in Photonic Materials and Metamaterials
Abstract
Photonic technologies continue to drive the quest for new optical materials with unprecedented responses. A major frontier in this field is the exploration of nonlocal (spatially dispersive) materials, going beyond the local, wavevector-independent assumption traditionally made in optical material modeling. On one end, the growing interest in plasmonic, polaritonic and quantum materials has revealed naturally occurring nonlocalities, emphasizing the need for more accurate models to predict and design their optical responses. This has major implications also for topological, nonreciprocal, and time-varying systems based on these material platforms. Beyond natural materials, artificially structured materials--metamaterials and metasurfaces--can provide even stronger and engineered nonlocal effects, emerging from long-range interactions or multipolar effects. This is a rapidly expanding area in the field of photonic metamaterials, with open frontiers yet to be explored. In the case of metasurfaces, in particular, nonlocality engineering has become a powerful tool for designing strongly wavevector-dependent responses, enabling enhanced wavefront control, spatial compression, multifunctional devices, and wave-based computing. Furthermore, nonlocality and related concepts play a critical role in defining the ultimate limits of what is possible in optics, photonics, and wave physics. This Roadmap aims to survey the most exciting developments in nonlocal photonic materials, highlight new opportunities and open challenges, and chart new pathways that will drive this emerging field forward--toward new scientific discoveries and technological advancements.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.00519,
title = {Roadmap on Nonlocality in Photonic Materials and Metamaterials},
author = {Francesco Monticone and N. Asger Mortensen and Antonio I. Fernández-Domínguez and Yu Luo and Xuezhi Zheng and Christos Tserkezis and Jacob B. Khurgin and Tigran V. Shahbazyan and André J. Chaves and Nuno M. R. Peres and Gino Wegner and Kurt Busch and Huatian Hu and Fabio Della Sala and Pu Zhang and Cristian Ciracì and Javier Aizpurua and Antton Babaze and Andrei G. Borisov and Xue-Wen Chen and Thomas Christensen and Wei Yan and Yi Yang and Ulrich Hohenester and Lorenz Huber and Martijn Wubs and Simone De Liberato and P. A. D. Gonçalves and F. Javier García De Abajo and Ortwin Hess and Illya Tarasenko and Joel D. Cox and Line Jelver and Eduardo J. C. Dias and Miguel Sánchez Sánchez and Dionisios Margetis and Guillermo Gómez-Santos and Tobias Stauber and Sergei Tretyakov and Constantin Simovski and Samaneh Pakniyat and J. Sebastián Gómez-Díaz and Igor V. Bondarev and Svend-Age Biehs and Alexandra Boltasseva and Vladimir M. Shalaev and Alexey V. Krasavin and Anatoly V. Zayats and Andrea Alù and Jung-Hwan Song and Mark L. Brongersma and Uriel Levy and Olivia Y. Long and Cheng Guo and Shanhui Fan and Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi and Adam Overvig and Filipa R. Prudêncio and Mário G. Silveirinha and S. Ali Hassani Gangaraj and Christos Argyropoulos and Paloma A. Huidobro and Emanuele Galiffi and Fan Yang and John B. Pendry and David A. B. Miller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.00519},
year = {2025}
}