Optically Thin Metallic Films for High-Radiative-Efficiency Plasmonics
Name
Soljacic_Optically thin.pdf
Size
2.21 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
69fb9a4d8dd2516944008a3ba5aee949
Author(s)
Hsu, Chia Wei
Miller, Owen D.
Yang, Yi
Zhen, Bo
Soljacic, Marin
Joannopoulos, John
Date Issued
May 2016
Journal
Nano Letters
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Citation
Yang, Yi et al. “Optically Thin Metallic Films for High-Radiative-Efficiency Plasmonics.” Nano Letters 16.7 (2016): 4110–4117.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Plasmonics enables deep-subwavelength concentration of light and has become important for fundamental studies as well as real-life applications. Two major existing platforms of plasmonics are metallic nanoparticles and metallic films. Metallic nanoparticles allow efficient coupling to far field radiation, yet their synthesis typically leads to poor material quality. Metallic films offer substantially higher quality materials, but their coupling to radiation is typically jeopardized due to the large momentum mismatch with free space. Here, we propose and theoretically investigate optically thin metallic films as an ideal platform for high-radiative-efficiency plasmonics. For far-field scattering, adding a thin high-quality metallic substrate enables a higher quality factor while maintaining the localization and tunability that the nanoparticle provides. For near-field spontaneous emission, a thin metallic substrate, of high quality or not, greatly improves the field overlap between the emitter environment and propagating surface plasmons, enabling high-Purcell (total enhancement >10[superscript 4]), high-quantum-yield (>50%) spontaneous emission, even as the gap size vanishes (3–5 nm). The enhancement has almost spatially independent efficiency and does not suffer from quenching effects that commonly exist in previous structures.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b00853
