No Arabic abstract
We report on lasing at visible wavelengths in arrays of ferromagnetic Ni nanodisks overlaid with an organic gain medium. We demonstrate that by placing an organic gain material within the mode volume of the plasmonic nanoparticles both the radiative and, in particular, the high ohmic losses of Ni nanodisk resonances can be compensated. Under increasing pump fluence, the systems exhibit a transition from lattice-modified spontaneous emission to lasing, the latter being characterized by highly directional and sub-nanometer linewidth emission. By breaking the symmetry of the array, we observe tunable multimode lasing at two wavelengths corresponding to the particle periodicity along the two principal directions of the lattice. Our results pave the way for loss-compensated magnetoplasmonic devices and topological photonics.
Periodic arrays of air nanoholes in thin metal films that support surface plasmon resonances can provide an alternative approach for boosting the light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. Indeed, nanohole arrays have garnered great interest in recent years for their use in biosensing, light emission enhancement and spectroscopy. However, the large-scale use of nanohole arrays in emerging technology requires new low-cost fabrication techniques. Here, we demonstrate a simple technique to fabricate nanohole arrays and examine their photonic applications. In contrast to the complicated and most commonly used electron beam lithography technique, hexagonal arrays of nanoholes are fabricated by using a simple combination of shadowing nanosphere lithography technique and electron beam deposition. These arrays are shown to offer enhancements in the lasing emission of an organic dye liquid gain medium with a quality factor above 150. Additionally, a 7-fold increase in Purcell factor is observed for CdSe quantum dot-integrated nanohole arrays.
Linewidth-tunable lasers have great application requirements in the fields of high-resolution spectroscopy, optical communications and other industry and scientific research. Here, the switchable plasmonic scattering of the metal particles with plenty of nanogaps is proposed as an effective method to achieve linewidth-tunable random lasers. By using the nonlinear optical effect of the environment medium, the metal particles demonstrate the transition from local scattering of nanogaps with high spatial frequency to traditional Mie scattering free from detail information with increasing the pump power density. Based on these two scattering processes, random lasers can be continuously driven from a narrow-linewidth configuration exhibiting nanogap effect dominated resonances to a broad-linewidth regime of collectively coupling oscillating among nanowires (or nanoflowers), demonstrating the dynamic range of linewidth exceeds two orders of magnitude. This phenomenon may provide a platform for further studying of the conclusive mechanism of random lasing and supply a new approach to tune the linewidth of random lasers for further applications in high-illumination imaging and biology detection.
In this paper, we proposed a theoretical model in the far-infrared and terahertz (THz) bands, which is a dumbbell-shaped graphene metamaterial arrays with a combination of graphene nanorod and two semisphere-suspended heads. We report a detailed theoretical investigation on how to enhance localized electric field and the absorption in the dumbbell-shaped graphene metamaterial arrays. The simulation results show that by changing the geometrical parameters of the structure and the Fermi level of graphene, we can change the absorption characteristics. Furthermore, we have discovered that the resonant wavelength is insensitive to TM polarization. In addition, we also find that the double-layer graphene arrays have better absorption characteristics than single-layer graphene arrays. This work allows us to achieve tunable terahertz absorber, and may also provide potential applications in optical filter and biochemical sensing.
Prospects of using metal hole arrays for the enhanced optical detection of molecular chirality in nanosize volumes are investigated. Light transmission through the holes filled with an optically active material is modeled and the activity enhancement by more than an order of magnitude is demonstrated. The spatial resolution of the chirality detection is shown to be of a few tens of nanometers. From comparing the effect in arrays of cylindrical holes and holes of complex chiral shape, it is concluded that the detection sensitivity is determined by the plasmonic near field enhancement. The intrinsic chirality of the arrays due to their shape appears to be less important.
Plasmonic photoconductive antennas have great promise for increasing responsivity and detection sensitivity of conventional photoconductive detectors in time-domain terahertz imaging and spectroscopy systems. However, operation bandwidth of previously demonstrated plasmonic photoconductive antennas has been limited by bandwidth constraints of their antennas and photoconductor parasitics. Here, we present a powerful technique for realizing broadband terahertz detectors through large-area plasmonic photoconductive nano-antenna arrays. A key novelty that makes the presented terahertz detector superior to the state-of-the art is a specific large-area device geometry that offers a strong interaction between the incident terahertz beam and optical pump at the nanoscale, while maintaining a broad operation bandwidth. The large device active area allows robust operation against optical and terahertz beam misalignments. We demonstrate broadband terahertz detection with signal-to-noise ratio levels as high as 107 dB.