Fluorescence emission mediated by metal-dielectric-metal fishnet metasurface: Spatially selective excitation and double enhancement

Abstract

Enhancement of fluorescent radiation is of great importance for applications including biological imaging, high-sensitivity detectors, and integrated light sources. Strong electromagnetic fields can be created around metallic nanoparticles or in gap of nanostructures, where the local state density of radiating mode is then dramatically enhanced. While enhanced fluorescent emission has been demonstrated in many metallic nanoparticles and nanoparticle pairs, simultaneous mediation of absorption and emission processes of fluorescent emitters remains challenging in metallic nanostructures. Here, we investigate fluorescent emission mediated by metal-dielectric-metal fishnet metasurface, in which localized surface plasmon (LSP) and magnetic plasmon polaritons (MPPs) modes are coupled with absorption and emission processes, respectively. For absorption process, coupling of the LSP mode enables spatially-selective excitation of the fluorescent emitters by rotating the polarization of the pump laser beam. In addition, the polarization-dependent MPP mode enables manipulation of both polarization and wavelength of the fluorescent emission by introducing a rectangular fishnet structure. All the experimental observations are further corroborated by finite-difference time-domain simulations. The structure reported here has great potential for application to color light-emitting devices and nanoscale integrated light sources.