Extraordinary Optical Transmission and Enhanced Magneto-optical Faraday Effect in the Cascaded Double-fishnet Structure with Periodic Rectangular Apertures

Abstract

A significant enhancement of the magneto-optical Faraday rotation and extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) in the cascaded double-fishnet (CDF) structure with periodic rectangular apertures is theoretically predicted by using the extended finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The results demonstrate that the transmittance spectrum of the CDF structure has two EOT resonant peaks in a broad spectrum spanning visible to near-infrared wavebands, one of them coinciding with the enhanced Faraday rotation and large figure of merit (FOM) at the same wavelength. It is most important that the resonant position and intensity of the transmittance, Faraday rotation and FOM can be simply tailored by adjusting the incident wavelength, the thickness of the magnetic layer, and the offset between two metallic rectangular apertures, etc. Furthermore, the intrinsic physical mechanism of the resonance characteristics of the transmittance and Faraday rotation is thoroughly studied by investigating the electromagnetic field distributions at the location of resonance. It is shown that the transmittance resonance is mainly determined by different hybrid modes of surface plasmons (SPs) and plasmonic electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) behavior, and the enhancement of Faraday rotation is mostly governed by the plasmonic electromagnetically induced absorption (EIA) behavior and the conversion of the transverse magnetic (TM) mode and transverse electric (TE) mode in the magnetic dielectric layer.