Broadband telecom transparency of semiconductor-coated metal nanowires: more transparent than glass

Metallic nanowires (NW) coated with a high permittivity dielectric are proposed as means to strongly reduce the light scattering of the conducting NW, rendering them transparent at infrared wavelengths of interest in telecommunications. Based on a simple, universal law derived from electrostatics arguments, we find appropriate parameters to reduce the scattering efficiency of hybrid metal-dielectric NW by up to three orders of magnitude as compared with the scattering efficiency of the homogeneous metallic NW. We show that metal@dielectric structures are much more robust against fabrication imperfections than analogous dielectric@metal ones. The bandwidth of the transparent region entirely covers the near IR telecommunications range. Although this effect is optimum at normal incidence and for a given polarization, rigorous theoretical and numerical calculations reveal that transparency is robust against changes in polarization and angle of incidence, and also holds for relatively dense periodic or random arrangements. A wealth of applications based on metal-NWs may benefit from such invisibility.