Abstract
Plasmonic nanostructures hold promise for the realization of ultra-thin sub-wavelength devices, reducing power operating thresholds and enabling nonlinear optical functionality in metasurfaces. However, this promise is substantially undercut by absorption introduced by resistive losses, causing the metasurface community to turn away from plasmonics in favour of alternative material platforms (e.g., dielectrics) that provide weaker field enhancement, but more tolerable losses. Here, we report a plasmonic metasurface with a quality-factor (Q-factor) of 2340 in the telecommunication C band by exploiting surface lattice resonances (SLRs), exceeding the record by an order of magnitude. Additionally, we show that SLRs retain many of the same benefits as localized plasmonic resonances, such as field enhancement and strong confinement of light along the metal surface. Our results demonstrate that SLRs provide an exciting and unexplored method to tailor incident light fields, and could pave the way to flexible wavelength-scale devices for any optical resonating application.
Highlights
Plasmonic nanostructures hold promise for the realization of ultra-thin sub-wavelength devices, reducing power operating thresholds and enabling nonlinear optical functionality in metasurfaces
Metallic nanostructures are essential to many applications in photonics, including biosensing[1], spectroscopy[2,3], nanolasing[4], all-optical switching[5], nonlinear optical processes[6], and metasurface technologies[7,8,9]
A plasmonic metasurface resonator enables a series of specialized optical responses, including phase-matching-free nonlinear optical effects[6,17], strongly localized field enhancements[9], multi-mode operation[18], and a spatially localized optical response[7]
Summary
Plasmonic nanostructures hold promise for the realization of ultra-thin sub-wavelength devices, reducing power operating thresholds and enabling nonlinear optical functionality in metasurfaces. Metallic nanostructures are essential to many applications in photonics, including biosensing[1], spectroscopy[2,3], nanolasing[4], all-optical switching[5], nonlinear optical processes[6], and metasurface technologies[7,8,9] These plasmonic elements form flexible components with geometry-dependent responses and have many desirable properties, such as the possibility to confine light to sub-wavelength scales and large localfield enhancements[9,10]. A plasmonic metasurface resonator enables a series of specialized optical responses, including phase-matching-free nonlinear optical effects[6,17], strongly localized field enhancements[9], multi-mode operation[18], and a spatially localized optical response[7]. Recent theoretical studies of this platform have predicted Q-factors on the order of 103 by properly engineering the dimensions of the individual nanostructures and the period of the lattice[31,32,33], hinting at the possibility of combining the aforementioned benefits of metals with long interaction times provided by high Q-
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