Optical slot antenna and its application

Abstract

We present an optical slot antenna and its application. By measuring transmission spectra and far-field radiation pattern of metallic slots with nanometer scale, we show that a metallic nanoslot has the properties of an antenna, which are resonance, polarization, and bidirectional far-field radiation pattern, and can be regarded as a magnetic dipole in optical region. Additionally, we also make the unidirectional radiation by adapting the geometry of RF Yagi-Uda antenna and applying slot antenna. By the aid of phase analysis based on 3-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulation, we can increase the front-to-back ratio of an optical slot Yagi-Uda antenna up to about 5. As the application of a slot antenna, we integrate a metal-insulator-metal plasmonic waveguide with a slot antenna. A surface plasmon waveguide mode propagating in MIM structure is well-coupled to a slot antenna and radiates into free-space in form of dipole radiation. By adding an auxiliary structure that has the role of reflector as like a slot Yagi-Uda antenna, the direction of radiation from a slot antenna integrated with a plasmonic waveguide can be controlled efficiently. Besides the possibility of integration with a waveguide, we expect that a slot antenna can be applied to active devices such as light emitting diodes or lasers for the future.