Plasmonic Aperture Research Articles

Tuning Light–Matter Interactions with Mid-Infrared Plasmonic Coaxial Apertures

Thin plasmonic coaxial apertures have unique optical properties, including extraordinary light transmission and confinement, that can enhance light–matter interactions and can be applied for sensing applications. Here, we use finite-difference time-domain simulations to investigate the mid-infrared optical response of coaxial aperture arrays, consisting of a combination of disk arrays and perforated films of periodically arranged holes. We find that the plasmon response of these arrays is governed by the disk size with little influence from the hole size, with surface plasmon excitation around the circumference of the disks mediating extraordinary optical transmission and strong near-field enhancements. The simulations also predict that light–matter coupling with the vibrational modes of a poly(methyl methacrylate) film placed inside the coaxial apertures can be tuned from weak to strong by adjusting the thickness of the coaxial aperture array’s metal film. Such open structures that can promote tailored light–matter interactions are therefore attractive target platforms for plasmon-enhanced sensing and polaritonic chemistry.

High-speed nanoscale optical trapping with plasmonic double nanohole aperture.

Optical trapping with plasmonic double nanohole (DNH) apertures has proven to be an efficient method for trapping sub-50 nm particles due to their suppressed plasmonic heating effect and very high electric field enhancement in the gap region of the aperture. However, plasmonic tweezers are generally diffusion-limited, requiring particles to diffuse down to a few tens of nanometres from the high field enhancement regions before they can be trapped. The loading of target particles to the plasmonic hotspots can take several minutes for diluted samples. In this work, rapid particle transport and trapping of a 25 nm polystyrene sphere is demonstrated, leveraging an electrothermoplasmonic flow induced upon application of an AC field in the presence of a laser-induced temperature gradient. Using this approach, we demonstrate the rapid transport of a 25 nm polystyrene particle across a distance of 63 μm and trapping at the DNH under 16 s. This platform shows great potential for applications involving simultaneous trapping and plasmon-enhanced spectroscopies, such as Raman enhancement via the intense electric field enhancement in the DNH gap.

Decoupled Phase Modulation for Circularly Polarized Light via Chiral Metasurfaces

Metasurfaces have emerged as one highly vibrant frontier in the field of nanophotonics, since they enable some unique and practical means to modulate the phase, polarization, angular momentum, and spatial field distribution through structural engineering. However, the current methods of phase modulation based on the propagation phase and Pancharatnam–Berry phase are typically interrelated between two eigen spin states for each single-step modulation. It means that when the phase of left-handed circularly polarized (LCP) light is modulated by a metasurface, the phase of right-handed circularly polarized (RCP) light will change as well, imposing substantial constraints if spin-decoupled or spin-independent applications are sought. In this paper, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate a new phase modulation pathway based on chiral metasurfaces consisting of V-shaped plasmonic apertures, which enable fully decoupled phase modulation for the two eigen spin states. Two enantiomers are proposed to achieve the desired phase decoupling. Specifically, the enantiomer can manipulate the phase of the LCP component of a light beam without changing the phase of the RCP component, and vice versa. Our method expands the methods of phase engineering and can help us design novel devices for a wide range of applications, including polarimetric imaging, chiroptical detection, molecular spectroscopy, and quantum information processing.

Complex 10-nm resolution nanogap and nanowire geometries for plasmonic metasurface miniaturization.

Emerging electromagnetic inverse design methods have pushed nanofabrication methods to their limits to extract maximum performance from plasmonic aperture-based metasurfaces. Using plasmonic metamaterial-lined apertures as an example, we demonstrate the importance of fine nanowire and nanogap features for achieving strong miniaturization of plasmonic nanoapertures. Metamaterial-lined nanoapertures are miniaturized over bowtie nanoapertures with identical minimum feature sizes by a factor of 25% without loss of field enhancement. We show that features as small as 10 nm can be reliably patterned over the wide areas required of metasurfaces using the helium focused ion beam microscope. Under imperfect fabrication conditions, we achieve 11-nm-wide nanogaps and 12-nm-wide nanowires over an area of 13 µm2, and successfully validate our results with optical characterization and comparable full-wave simulations.

Sieving nanometer enantiomers using bound states in the continuum from the metasurface.

Enantioseparation of chiral molecules is an important aspect of life sciences, chemical syntheses, and physics. Yet, the prevailing chemical techniques are not effective. Recently, a few types of plasmonic apertures have been theoretically proposed to distinguish between chiral molecules that vary based on their handedness under circularly polarized illumination. Both analytic calculations and numerical simulation demonstrated that enantioselective optical sieving could be obtained at the nanoscale using a large chiral optical force based on plasmonic resonance enhanced near-field chiral gradients in the aperture. Nevertheless, scaling this scheme to chiral entities of a few nanometer size (i.e., proteins and DNA) faces formidable challenges owing to the fabrication limit of a deeply sub-nanometer aperture and the intense power levels needed for nanoscale trapping. In contrast, by extending the Friedrich–Wintgen theory of the bound states in the continuum (BIC) to photonics, one may explore another mechanism to obtain enantioselective separation of chiral nanoparticles using all-dielectric nanostructures. Here, we present a metasurface composed of an array of silicon (Si) nanodisks embedded with off-set holes, which supports a sharp high-quality (Q) magnetic dipolar (MD) resonance originating from a distortion of symmetry-protected BIC, so called quasi-BIC. We, for the very first time, show that such a quasi-BIC MD resonance can markedly improve the chiral lateral force on the paired enantiomers with linearly polarized illumination. This quasi-BIC MD resonance can enhance the chirality density gradient with alternating sign at each octant around the Si nanodisk, while exhibiting a small gradient for the electromagnetic (EM) density. This offers a chiral lateral force that is 1 order larger in magnitude compared to the non-chiral lateral forces on sub-2 nm chiral objects with a chirality parameter of ±0.01. Moreover, the quasi-BIC MD resonance can excite four pairs of diverse optical potential wells (−13kBT) that are distributed uniformly along the outer edge of the resonator, enabling a simultaneous separation of four paired enantiomers. Our proposed dielectric metasurface may move forward the techniques of enantioseparation and enantiopurification, taking a novel perspective to advanced all-optical enantiopure synthesis.

Algorithm‐Designed Plasmonic Nanotweezers: Quantitative Comparison by Theory, Cathodoluminescence, and Nanoparticle Trapping

AbstractPlasmonic apertures permit optical fields to be concentrated into sub‐wavelength regions. This enhances the optical gradient force, enabling the precise trapping of nanomaterials such as quantum dots, proteins, and DNA molecules at modest laser powers. Double nanoholes, coaxial apertures, bowtie apertures, and other structures have been studied as plasmonic nanotweezers, with the design process generally comprising intuition followed by electromagnetic simulations with parameter sweeps. Here, instead, a computational algorithm is used to design plasmonic apertures for nanoparticle trapping. The resultant apertures have highly irregular shapes that, in combination with ring couplers also optimized by algorithm, are predicted to generate trapping forces more than an order of magnitude greater than those from the double nanohole design used as the optimization starting point. The designs are realized by fabricating precision apertures with a helium/neon ion microscope and are studied them by cathodoluminescence and optical trapping. It is shown that, at every laser intensity, the algorithm‐designed apertures can trap particles more tightly than the double nanohole.

Inverse Design of Plasmonic Structures with FDTD

Inverse design has greatly expanded nanophotonic devices and brought optimized performance. However, the use of inverse design for plasmonic structures has been challenging due to local field concentrations that can lead to errors in gradient calculation when the continuum adjoint method is used. On the other hand, with the discrete adjoint method one can achieve the exact gradient. Historically the discrete version is exclusively used with a Finite Element model, and applying the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method in inverse design of plasmonic structures is rarely attempted. Due to the popularity of using FDTD in simulating plasmonic structures, we integrate the discrete adjoint method with FDTD and present a framework to carry out inverse design of plasmonic structures using density-based topology optimization. We demonstrate the exactness of the gradient calculation for a plasmonic block structure with varying permittivity. Another challenge that is unique with plasmonic structures is that non-physical amplification caused by poorly chosen material interpolation can destroy a stable convergence of the optimization. To avoid this, we adopt a non-linear material interpolation scheme in the FDTD solver. In addition, filtering-and-projection regularization is incorporated to ensure manufacturability of the designed structures. As an example of this framework, successful reconstruction of electric fields of a plasmonic bowtie aperture is presented.

Extraordinary optical transmission and second harmonic generation in sub–10-nm plasmonic coaxial aperture

Abstract Recent development in nanofabrication technology has enabled the fabrication of plasmonic nanoapertures that can provide strong field concentrations beyond the diffraction limit. Further utilization of plasmonic nanoaperture requires the broadband tuning of the operating wavelength and precise control of aperture geometry. Here, we present a novel plasmonic coaxial aperture that can support resonant extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) with a peak transmittance of ~10% and a wide tuning range over a few hundred nanometers. Because of the shadow deposition process, we could precisely control the gap size of the coaxial aperture down to the sub–10-nm scale. The plasmonic resonance of the SiNx/Au disk at the center of the coaxial aperture efficiently funnels the incident light into the sub–10-nm gap and allows strong electric field confinement for efficient second harmonic generation (SHG), as well as EOT. In addition to the experiment, we theoretically investigated the modal properties of the plasmonic coaxial aperture depending on the structural parameters and correlation between EOT and SHG through finite-difference time-domain simulations. We believe that our plasmonic coaxial apertures, which are readily fabricated by the nanoimprinting process, can be a versatile, practical platform for enhanced light–matter interaction and its nonlinear optical applications.

New development of nanoscale spectroscopy using scanning probe microscope

Nanoscale spectroscopy and imaging, a hybrid technique that combines a scanning probe microscope (SPM) with spectroscopy, can provide nanoscale topographical, spectral, and chemical information of a sample. In recent years, developments in nanofabrication technology have dramatically advanced the field of nanospectroscopy for applications in various fields including nanoscale materials, electronics, catalysis, and biological systems. However, challenges in nanofocusing of light for excitation and extracting weak signals of individual molecules from the background signal persist in conventional nanoscale spectroscopy including tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, scanning near-field microscopy (SNOM/NSOM), and photoluminescence spectroscopy. This article reviews new approaches to design plasmonic SPM probes that improve important aspects of nanospectroscopy such as nanofocusing, far-to-near-field-coupling efficiency, background suppression, and ease of fabrication. The authors survey a diverse range of novel schemes to excite propagating surface plasmon polaritons on the probe surface to attain highly enhanced nanofocused light at the apex for nanoscale spectroscopies. These schemes include grating coupler configurations on the plasmonic SPM probes, aperture and apertureless plasmonic SNOM probes, nanostructured resonators coupled with a high-quality-factor photonic cavity, interfacing of the optical fiber with plasmonic nanowires, and nanoparticle-coupled plasmonic nanowires. These innovative probes merge the field of fiber optics, plasmonics, quantum optics, and nanomaterials. The authors provide a perspective on new approaches that combine the advantages of these probes and have the potential for significant advancement in nanoscale imaging and other types of nanoscale spectroscopies including scanning quantum spin spectroscopy and scanning thermal imaging microscopy.

Isolating Nanocrystals with an Individual Erbium Emitter: A Route to a Stable Single-Photon Source at 1550 nm Wavelength.

Single-photon emitters based on individual atoms or individual atomic-like defects are highly sought-after components for future quantum technologies. A key challenge in this field is how to isolate just one such emitter; the best approaches still have an active emitter yield of only 50% so that deterministic integration of single active emitters is not yet possible. Here, we demonstrate the ability to isolate individual erbium emitters embedded in 20 nm nanocrystals of NaYF4 using plasmonic aperture optical tweezers. The optical tweezers capture the nanocrystal, whereas the plasmonic aperture enhances the emission of the Er and allows the measurement of discrete emission rate values corresponding to different numbers of erbium ions. Three separate synthesis runs show near-Poissonian distribution in the discrete levels of emission yield that correspond to the expected ion concentrations, indicating that the yield of active emitters is approximately 80%. Fortunately, the trap allows for selecting the nanocrystals with only a single emitter, and so this gives a route to isolating and integrating single emitters in a deterministic way. This demonstration is a promising step toward single-photon quantum information technologies that utilize single ions in a solid-state medium, particularly because Er emits in the low-loss fiber-optic 1550 nm telecom band.

LSPR Excitation on Au Nanorings From Integrated Hybrid Plasmonic Aperture Waveguide and Its Application in Methanol Detection in the IR-Band

The presented work deals with an infra-red (IR)-band methanol sensor, which has been realized in an integrated device having hybrid plasmonic aperture waveguide and Au-nanoring array over broad wall of it covered by porous silicon clad. Through modeling and numerical simulations, we have shown that suitable synthesized aperture in the waveguide can excite localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) on the nanorings of suitable diameter via radiative field coupling, whereas LSPR can be tuned with the received methanol by the porous silicon clad. Thus, by contrasting the power available at the sense port of the waveguide with null and finite methanol doses, we have determined sensitivity (STM) and figure of merit (FOM) of the sensor, and our further analyses suggest that the sensor response can be tailored by diameter of aperture and ring, and by the porosity of the silicon cladding medium. In this respect, we have found that, for 20%-45% clad porosity, S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TM</sub> = 77.95-66.66 nm/RIU and FOM = 17.51-7.66/RIU can be achieved during methanol detection.

Efficient Optical Trapping and Detection of Nanoparticle Via Plasmonic Bowtie Notch

For manipulating nanoparticles, we propose a nanotweezer named plasmonic bowtie notch (PBN) by adding a thin metal film to the bottom of plasmonic bowtie aperture. The PBN can exert a large trapping force on nanoparticle because the enhanced field of resonance mode can be much accessed by nanoparticle. The optical properties and factors influencing trapping force of PBN are fully investigated and discussed. The optimized PBN shows an excellent trapping capability with ultralow threshold excitation intensity of 0.64 mW/μm2 for stable trapping of a 100 nm polystyrene particle. In addition, it provides a label-free detection of the trapped particle by observing the extinction spectrum. The sensitivity to trapped target size of 71 pm redshift in peak wavelength per 1 nm increase of particle size is relatively high compared with those obtained from most near-field tweezers. Furthermore, the footprint of PBN is only 200 nm × 220 nm. The capabilities of the proposed design show a great potential in the application of nanoparticle trapping and sensing.

Role of optical angular momentum in enhanced transmission process of plasmonic coaxial nanoring aperture

The nano groove can highly improve the transmittance of coaxial nanoring aperture due to the excitation of surface plasmon polariton (SPP). The total angular momentum carried by incident beam is reserved in the whole process and transferred to the SPP, thus the vortex SPP carrying orbital angular momentum is generated. The enhanced transmittance of nano aperture by vortex SPP has a wide range of applications, but its physical mechanism has been ignored for a long time. Here we study the process of the enhanced transmittance of the coaxial nanoring aperture and provide a model to describe the process of photon transmission. When the incident light irradiates on the coaxial nanoring aperture and nano groove, the vortex SPP induced by the groove propagates to coaxial nanoring aperture. Some of the photons in the SPP are coupled into the coaxial nanoring aperture and some are reflected back. The reflected photons travel back and forth multiple times between the coaxial nanoring aperture and nano groove. The vortex SPP interacts with the incident beam at the round of coaxial nanoring aperture, which determines the intensity at the round of the coaxial nano aperture, and thus affecting the transmittance. We systematically study the influence of optical angular momentum and the radius of the nano groove on the transmittance of coaxial nanoring aperture by using theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. The results show that the optical angular momentum and radius of the nano groove both affect the radial propagation phase of vortex SPP from nano groove to coaxial nanoring aperture, hence affecting the intensity of the electric field at the round of coaxial nanoring aperture and consequently determine the transmittance. The transmittance peaks of incident beams with different optical angular momenta will appear at different radii of the nano grooves, which provides a potential way to modulate the transmittance by adjusting the radius of the nano groove. This study is instructive for designing the enhanced optical transmission nano device based on vortex SPP.

Active polarization control with a parity-time-symmetric plasmonic resonator

Control of the polarization state of light is essential for many technologies, but is often limited by weak light-matter interactions that necessitate long device path lengths or significantly reduce the signal intensity. Here, we investigate a nanoscale plasmonic aperture capable of modifying the polarization state of far-field transmitted light without loss in the probe signal. The aperture is a coaxial resonator consisting of a dielectric ring embedded within a metallic film; parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetric inclusions of loss and gain within the dielectric ring enable polarization control. Since the coaxial aperture enables near-thresholdless $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry breaking, polarization control is achieved with realistic levels of loss and gain. Exploiting this sensitivity, we show that the aperture can function as a tunable waveplate, with the transmitted ellipticity of circularly polarized incident light changing continuously with the dissipation coefficient from $\pi/2$ to 0 (i.e. linear polarization). Rotation of linearly polarized light with unity efficiency is also possible, with a continuously-tunable degree of rotation. This compact, low-threshold, and reconfigurable polarizer may enable next-generation, high-efficiency displays, routers, modulators, and metasurfaces.

Impact of Plasmon-Induced Atoms Migration in Harmonic Generation

Under illumination of a Ti:sapphire femtosecond oscillator, amplification of third harmonic generation by subwavelength plasmonic apertures is observed. However, the harmonic yield efficiency decays rapidly over time. In this work we investigate the physical phenomena behind the temporal attenuation of the harmonic signal. From high-resolution scanning electron micrographs and two-dimensional energy dispersive X-ray maps, we conclude that the attenuation of the third harmonic is attributed to trapping of a low-density carbon layer inside the plasmonic apertures. Furthermore, we show that the profile of the carbon deposit follows the enhanced electric near-field distribution, which indicates that the carbon atoms are transported to the field hotspot by the plasmonically enhanced optical tweezer effect. From the measurement of linear transmission spectra, we find that the dielectric constant inside the nanoholes is increased by the carbon deposit. However, numerical simulations demonstrate that the increase...

Optical band-stop filter and multi-wavelength channel selector with plasmonic complementary aperture embedded in double-ring resonator

A compact nanoscale wavelength band-stop filter with aperture embedded in double-ring resonator is proposed and numerically investigated by using Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. With a narrow aperture created between embedded double rings, the modes of the split-ring cavity can be modulated by the aperture in different manners when the parameters of the aperture are changed. Furthermore, the absorption peaks of resonator modes can be selectively inhibited by altering the positions of the aperture without changing outer size of the resonator. Based on above characteristics, a 1×2 multiple-contact channel selector is designed with a rotating aperture which can select the output waveguide. The proposed filter and selector have potential applications in highly integrated optical circuits.

Subdiffraction light focusing using a cross sectional ridge waveguide nanoscale aperture.

We report a new type of plasmonic nanoscale ridge aperture and its fabrication process which is based on layer-by-layer planar lithography. This new fabrication method allows us to create desired nanoscale features of a plasmonic ridge waveguide nanoscale aperture, which helps to confine a near-field spot to sub-wavelength dimensions. Numerical simulations using Finite Element Method (FEM) are performed to calculate the near-field distribution around the exit of the aperture. Measurements using scattering near-field scanning optical microscopy (s-NSOM) confirm the design and demonstrate that the aperture is capable of producing focused spots in the ridge gap at the exit of the aperture. The planar lithography process is a step toward mass production of such plasmonic structures for applications including heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).

10 nm gap bowtie plasmonic apertures fabricated by modified lift-off process

Bowtie plasmonic apertures, with gap sizes down to 11 nm and silver film thickness of up to 150 nm (aspect ratio ∼14:1), were fabricated on a silicon nitride membrane. Transmission spectra feature the aperture resonances ranging from 470 to 687 nm, with quality factors around 10. The mode area of the smallest gap aperture is estimated to be as small as 0.002 (λ/n)2 using numerical modeling. Importantly, our fabrication technique, based on an e-beam lithography and a lift-off process, is scalable which allows fabrication of many devices in parallel over a relatively large area. We believe that the devices demonstrated in this work will find application in studying and engineering light-matter interactions.

Grating-flanked plasmonic coaxial apertures for efficient fiber optical tweezers

Subwavelength plasmonic apertures have been foundational for direct optical manipulation of nanoscale specimens including sub-100 nm polymeric beads, metallic nanoparticles and proteins. While most plasmonic traps result in two-dimensional localization, three-dimensional manipulation has been demonstrated by integrating a plasmonic aperture on an optical fiber tip. However, such 3D traps are usually inefficient since the optical mode of the fiber and the subwavelength aperture only weakly couple. In this paper we design more efficient optical-fiber-based plasmonic tweezers combining a coaxial plasmonic aperture with a plasmonic grating coupler at the fiber tip facet. Using full-field finite difference time domain analysis, we optimize the grating design for both gold and silver fiber-based coaxial tweezers such that the optical transmission through the apertures is maximized. With the optimized grating, we show that the maximum transmission efficiency increases from 2.5% to 19.6% and from 1.48% to 16.7% for the gold and silver structures respectively. To evaluate their performance as optical tweezers, we calculate the optical forces and the corresponding trapping potential on dielectric particles interacting with the apertures. We demonstrate that the enahncement in the transmission translates into an equivalent increase in the optical forces. Consequently, the optical power required to achieve stable optical trapping is significantly reduced allowing for efficient localization and 3D manipulation of sub-30 nm dielectric particles.

Plasmonic Multibowtie Aperture Antenna with Fano Resonance for Nanoscale Spectral Sorting

In this work we report a new type of nanostructure, the plasmonic multibowtie aperture antenna with Fano resonance for spectral sorting at the nanoscale. Redistribution of surface current in our device plays a critical role in mode coupling to generate Fano resonance, which has never been carefully discussed before. Numerical analyses show that interactions of the electric field, the surface current, and the resulting magnetic field are all important for achieving the desired spectral sorting. Depending on the constructive or destructive interference between the broadband dipole mode and the narrow band multipole mode, electric near-field amplitude and phase distributions switch dramatically across the Fano resonance, which are observed in real space using transmission-type s-SNOM. Based on the Fano interference, photons ranging from visible to infrared spectrum can be sorted through different channels at the nanoscale according to their wavelengths, which shows apparent advantages over other existing nan...