We review the properties of hyperbolic metamaterials and show that they are promising candidates as substrates for nanoimaging, nanosensing, fluorescence engineering, and controlling thermal emission. Hyperbolic metamaterials can support unique bulk modes, tunable surface plasmon polaritons, and surface hyperbolic states (Dyakonov plasmons) that can be used for a variety of applications. We compare the effective medium predictions with practical realizations of hyperbolic metamaterials to show their potential for radiative decay engineering, bioimaging, subsurface sensing, metaplasmonics, and super-Planckian thermal emission. 1. Introduction Metamaterial technologies have matured over the past decade for a variety of applications such as superresolution imaging [1, 2], cloaking [3], and perfect absorption [4]. Various classes of metamaterials have emerged that show exotic electromagnetic properties like negative index [5], optical magnetism [6], giant chirality [7–9], epsilon-near-zero [10], bianisotropy [11], and spatial dispersion [12] among many others. The central guiding principle in all the metamaterials consists of fabricating a medium composed of unit cells far below the size of the wavelength. The unique resonances of the unit cell based on its structure and material composition as well as coupling between the cells lead to a designed macroscopic electromagnetic response. One class of artificial media which received a lot of attention are hyperbolic metamaterials [13–15]. They derive their name from the unique form of the isofrequency curve which is hyperbolic instead of circular as in conventional dielectrics. The reason for their widespread interest is due to the relative ease of nanofabrication, broadband nonresonant response, wavelength tunability, bulk three-dimensional response, and high figure of merit [16]. Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) can be used for a variety of applications from negative index waveguides [13] and subdiffraction photonic funnels [17] to nanoscale resonators [18]. In the visible and near-infrared wavelength regions, HMMs are the most promising artificial media for practical applications [19]. In this paper, we describe the potential of hyperbolic metamaterial substrates for five distinct applications: fluorescence engineering [20–22], nanoimaging [23–25], subsurface sensing [26], dyakonov plasmons [27, 28], and super-Planckian thermal emission [29, 30]. Our work presents a unified view for these distinct applications and elucidates many key design principles useful to experimentalists and theorists. We focus on the
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