Contents I. Introduction
Metamaterials became a stepping stone for the control over light furnishing the engine for advanced photonic applications. In this quest, special attention is paid to uniaxial epsilon-nearzero (ENZ) metamaterials, which can be realized as arrays of plasmonic nanorods. The ability to reach the regime of the zero value of the real part of the metamaterial’ extraordinary permittivity along with its sign change in the ENZ-regime sparked an extensive research efforts to tame these structures for light manipulations. It afforded ultrathin polarization converters and optical sensors, manifold enhancement of nonlinear optical effects, to name but a few [1]. It is noteworthy, that a low permittivity makes nonlocal effects significant for the optical response, which was exploited for molding of spatiotemporal optical vortices [2]. In this work, we propose the approach of a highly temperature-sensitive optical device that exploits the ENZ-mediated nonlocality of gold nanorod arrays surrounded by nematic liquid crystals (LCs).
