Enhanced near field focus steering of rectangular nanoslit metasurface structure

Abstract

<sec> Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are electromagnetic excitations propagating along the metal-dielectric interface. The SPPs excited by the metal micro/nano structures have the ability to manipulate the light on a subwavelength scale. The SPPs are of interest to researchers for its excellent subwavelength field confinement and local field enhancement. So far, the SPPs have found numerous applications in optical tweezers, biological sensors, and near-field holographic imaging, due to its subwavelength focusing. </sec><sec> In order to achieve enhanced near field subwavelength focusing, we propose a metasurface structure in this paper, which is composed of rectangular nanoslit circular arrays and multilayer annular slits. The function of the inner ring arrays is to excite SPPs and the outer ring slits is to enhance focusing. The electric field expression of SPP is studied analytically and theoretically, and then the principle of rectangular nanoslit to excite SPP and the inner ring array structure to generate central focusing are explained. The parameters of the structure are optimized, and the focusing characteristics of the metasurface structure under different polarization light are studied by using the finite difference time domain method. Furthermore, we explain the principle of the external structure enhancing focusing by introducing the theory of Fresnel zone plate and depth modulation. The analytical expressions and simulations show that when the incident polarized light has a wavelength of 980 nm, the focal spot having a full width at half maximum of about 650 nm, and the distribution of the coupled field can be approximately expressed by the first kind Bessel function. Compared with the former single circular array structure, the composite structure proposed in this paper has a good effect of both enhancing the central focusing and inhibiting the outer field divergence, and the center focal spot intensity is doubled. In addition, the electric field excited by the arbitrary linearly polarized light is also discussed, the electric field satisfies the form of the polarization angle sinusoidal function multiplied by a Bessel function. <sec> The research results of our study have some applications in subwavelength light modulation, near-field imaging, optical tweezers, and subwavelength scale optical information processing and so on. </sec></sec>