Recent advances in nanoscale fabrication and characterization further accelerated research on photonics and plasmonics, which has already attracted long-standing interest. Alongside morphological constraints, phenomena in both fields highly depend on the materials' optical properties, dimensions, and surroundings. Building up the required knowledge and experience to design next-generation photonic devices can be a complex task for novice and experienced researchers who intend to evaluate the impact of subtle material and morphology variations while setting up experiments or getting a general overview. Here, we introduce the Photonic Materials Cloud (PMCloud), a web-based, interactive open tool for designing and analyzing photonic materials. PMCloud allows identification of the subtle differences between optical material models generated from a database, experimental data input, and inline-generated materials from various analytical models. Furthermore, it provides a fully interactive interface to evaluate their performance in important fundamental (numerical) optical experiments. We demonstrate PMCloud's applicability to state-of-the-art research questions, namely the comparison of the novel plasmonic materials aluminium-doped zinc oxide and zirconium nitride and the design of an optical, dielectric thin-film Bragg reflector. PMCloud opens a rapid, freely accessible path towards prototyping optical materials and simple fundamental devices and may serve as an educational platform for photonic materials research.
Keywords: electromagnetic modeling; engineering education; meta-material; nanoparticles; optical constants; plasmonics.