Abstract
Structural boundaries, materials and feeding sources are the three fundamental segments defining photonic devices. Since excitation is usually dictated by the application and there are infinite ways to select the spatial configuration of the component, an optimization with respect to the used media is both doable and useful. We provide several combinations of elements and compounds making high-performing electromagnetic devices in terms of absorption, scattering and unusual refraction with simple structures like bilayers, two- and three-dimensional core-shell particles or binary metasurfaces. Such large sets of potential candidates for the employed media can be deployed by experimentalists after applying a secondary sweep by imposing additional constraints concerning ease of fabrication.