Abstract
Nanoplasmonics has recently revolutionized our ability to control light on the nanoscale. Using metallic nanostructures with tailored shapes, it is possible to efficiently focus light into nanoscale field ‘hot spots'. High field enhancement factors have been achieved in such optical nanoantennas, enabling transformative science in the areas of single molecule interactions, highly enhanced nonlinearities and nanoscale waveguiding. Unfortunately, these large enhancements come at the price of high optical losses due to absorption in the metal, severely limiting real-world applications. Via the realization of a novel nanophotonic platform based on dielectric nanostructures to form efficient nanoantennas with ultra-low light-into-heat conversion, here we demonstrate an approach that overcomes these limitations. We show that dimer-like silicon-based single nanoantennas produce both high surface enhanced fluorescence and surface enhanced Raman scattering, while at the same time generating a negligible temperature increase in their hot spots and surrounding environments.
Highlights
Nanoplasmonics has recently revolutionized our ability to control light on the nanoscale
We show experimental results that illustrate both high near-field enhancement and ultra-low heat conversion in the visible-near infrared region using Si dimer nanoantennas with 20-nm gaps
We note that theoretical simulations predict (E/E0)[4] enhancements as large as B106 (E/E0 1⁄4 B32) for Si dimers with gaps as small as 4 nm, which would allow in principle single-molecule surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) detection[37]
Summary
Nanoplasmonics has recently revolutionized our ability to control light on the nanoscale. We turn to consider in detail, the thermal behaviour of these antennas, trying to demonstrate experimentally that they produce ultra-low heating when illuminated with optical fields, in contrast to traditional plasmonic nanoantennas.
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