Abstract
In recent years, the push to foster increased technological innovation and basic scientific and engineering interest from the broadest sectors of society has helped to accelerate the development of do-it-yourself (DIY) components, particularly those related to low-cost microcontroller boards. The attraction with DIY kits is the simplification of the intervening steps going from basic design to fabrication, albeit typically at the expense of quality. We present herein plasmon-assisted etching as an approach to extend the DIY theme to optics, specifically the table-top fabrication of planar optical components. By operating in the design space between metasurfaces and traditional flat optical components, we employ arrays of Au pillar-supported bowtie nanoantennas as a template structure. To demonstrate, we fabricate a Fresnel zone plate, diffraction grating and holographic mode converter—all using the same template. Applications to nanotweezers and fabricating heterogeneous nanoantennas are also shown.
Highlights
In recent years, the push to foster increased technological innovation and basic scientific and engineering interest from the broadest sectors of society has helped to accelerate the development of do-it-yourself (DIY) components, those related to low-cost microcontroller boards
The first step is to establish a template, which for the work carried out here is based on the use of Au pillar-supported bowtie nanoantennas (pBNAs)
As a step towards the realization of DIY optical components, we have demonstrated a novel approach to fabricating a class of planar optical components based on a template structure that consists of two-dimensional arrays of gold pBNAs
Summary
The push to foster increased technological innovation and basic scientific and engineering interest from the broadest sectors of society has helped to accelerate the development of do-it-yourself (DIY) components, those related to low-cost microcontroller boards. We show how arrays of Au pillar-supported bowtie nanoantennas (pBNAs) can be fabricated once in a cleanroom and subsequently used as a template that enables table-top fabrication of multiple, planar optical components using laser-scanning optical microscopy[12,13] This specialized template can be used to short-circuit the design iteration steps, obviating the need for in-depth knowledge of the phase-modifying behaviour of the constituent nanoparticles[12,13,14]. We demonstrate the table-top fabrication of a diffraction grating, Fresnel zone plate (FZP), and a holographic mode converter for generating orbital angular momentum—all using the same template To achieve this streamlining in fabrication, we sacrifice the subwavelength sculpting of the optical wavefront offered by metasurfaces with one that is diffraction-limited, which is sufficient for many basic applications. We demonstrate that PAE can be used to tune the radial extent of near-field trapping forces of nanotweezers[15,16], and offers a promising route to readily engineering novel nanoantenna arrays that are heterogeneous in both space and material composition[17,18,19,20]
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