There is an ever-increasing demand for technology that is faster and compact. However, there are limits in bandwidth, data transfer speeds, and natural abundance that keep this out of reach. A possible material to address these issues is Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) as it is a tunable, abundant, cost-effective. This thesis presents original research into multilayered structures made of AZO and its un-doped form, Zinc Oxide (ZnO), for the development of subwavelength scale opto-electronic devices. By using ultrashort optical pulses, the bandwidth limit is addressed, and by operating at and near where the structure’s permittivity approaches zero, ultrafast dynamic responses can be achieved. Novel contributions to the field of computational material science include anisotropic permittivity extraction through spectroscopic ellipsometry, numerical ultrashort pulse propagation at epsilon-near-zero (ENZ), adaptive pre-shaping for reducing distortion, and nonlinearity modeling through simulated optical pumping. Potential applications include super-resolution imaging, ultrafast optical communications, and signal processing.
