Di Zhang¹, Jijie Huang², Shikhar Misra³, Xuejing Wang⁴, Juanjuan Lu⁵, Jiawei Song⁵, Haiyan Wang^{5 1}University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX
²Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China
^{3/sup>Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India
4/sup>Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau
5/sup>Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Integration of nanocomposites and heterostructures can create extraordinary properties that cannot be achieved in single phase materials. Beyond oxide-oxide functional nanocomposite films which have been widely explored in the past two decades of this century, oxide-metal nanocomposites films have attracted increasing interests in recent years owing to their wide range of functionalities, such as metamaterials with plasmonic and hyperbolic optical properties, and ferroelectric, ferromagnetic and multiferroic behaviors. In this talk, I will focus on introducing the recently explored oxide-metal and nitride-metal vertically aligned nanocomposite (VAN) thin films showing exotic optical and magnetic-optic coupling effect. Detailed transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) characterization work revealed the film epitaxy and crystallographic lattice matching relation at metal/oxide (nitride) interfaces. The structure anisotropy of the nanocomposite films results in the corresponding anisotropic optical properties such as angular-dependent transmission and reflectivity, and plasmonic hyperbolic dispersion in the UV-Vis-NIR wavelength regimes. The novel physical properties and coupled functionalities render the VAN thin films to have great potentials in nanophotonic and optical sensing applications.}