No Arabic abstract
The interaction of electromagnetic waves with metallic nanostructures generates resonant oscillations of the conduction-band electrons at the metal surface. These resonances can lead to large enhancements of the incident field and to the confinement of light to small regions, typically several orders of magnitude smaller than the incident wavelength. The accurate prediction of these resonances entails several challenges. Small geometric variations in the plasmonic structure may lead to large variations in the electromagnetic field responses. Furthermore, the material parameters that characterize the optical behavior of metals at the nanoscale need to be determined experimentally and are consequently subject to measurement errors. It then becomes essential that any predictive tool for the simulation and design of plasmonic structures accounts for fabrication tolerances and measurement uncertainties. In this paper, we develop a reduced order modeling framework that is capable of real-time accurate electromagnetic responses of plasmonic nanogap structures for a wide range of geometry and material parameters. The main ingredients of the proposed method are: (i) the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method to numerically solve the equations governing electromagnetic wave propagation in dielectric and metallic media, (ii) a reference domain formulation of the time-harmonic Maxwells equations to account for geometry variations; and (iii) proper orthogonal decomposition and empirical interpolation techniques to construct an efficient reduced model. To demonstrate effectiveness of the models developed, we analyze geometry sensitivities and explore optimal designs of a 3D periodic annular nanogap structure.
Recent results have shown unprecedented control over separation distances between two metallic elements hundreds of nanometers in size, underlying the effects of free-electron nonlocal response also at mid-infrared wavelengths. Most of metallic systems however, still suffer from some degree of inhomogeneity due to fabrication-induced surface roughness. Nanoscale roughness in such systems might hinder the understanding of the role of microscopic interactions. Here we investigate the effect of surface roughness in coaxial nanoapertures resonating at mid-infrared frequencies. We show that although random roughness shifts the resonances in an unpredictable way, the impact of nonlocal effects can still be clearly observed. Roughness-induced perturbation on the peak resonance of the system shows a strong correlation with the effective gap size of the individual samples. Fluctuations due to fabrication imperfections then can be suppressed by performing measurements on structure ensembles in which averaging over a large number of samples provides a precise measure of the ideal systems optical properties.
Modern-day computers use electrical signaling for processing and storing data which is bandwidth limited and power-hungry. These limitations are bypassed in the field of communications, where optical signaling is the norm. To exploit optical signaling in computing, however, new on-chip devices that work seamlessly in both electrical and optical domains are needed. Phase change devices can in principle provide such functionality, but doing so in a single device has proved elusive due to conflicting requirements of size-limited electrical switching and diffraction-limited photonic devices. Here, we combine plasmonics, photonics and electronics to deliver a novel integrated phase-change memory and computing cell that can be electrically or optically switched between binary or multilevel states, and read-out in either mode, thus merging computing and communications technologies.
A giant thermal magnetoresistance is predicted for the electromagnetic transport of heat in magneto-optical plasmonic structures. In chains of InSb-Ag nanoparticles at room temperature, we found that the resistance can be increased by almost a factor of 2 with magnetic fields of 2 T. We show that this important change results from the strong spectral dependence of localized surface waves on the magnitude of the magnetic field.
Electromagnetic absorbers have drawn increasing attention in many areas. A series of plasmonic and metamaterial structures can work as efficient narrow band absorbers due to the excitation of plasmonic or photonic resonances, providing a great potential for applications in designing selective thermal emitters, bio-sensing, etc. In other applications such as solar energy harvesting and photonic detection, the bandwidth of light absorbers is required to be quite broad. Under such a background, a variety of mechanisms of broadband/multiband absorption have been proposed, such as mixing multiple resonances together, exciting phase resonances, slowing down light by anisotropic metamaterials, employing high loss materials and so on.
Observation of surface-plasmon phenomena that are dependent upon the handedness of the circularly polarized incident light (spin) is presented. The polarization-dependent near-field intensity distribution obtained in our experiment is attributed to the presence of a geometric phase arising from the interaction of light with an anisotropic and inhomogeneous nanoscale structure. A near-field vortex surface mode with a spin-dependent topological charge was obtained in a plasmonic microcavity. The remarkable phenomenon of polarization-sensitive focusing in a plasmonic structure was also demonstrated.