Prospects of Resonant Optical Antennas for Nano-Analysis

Abstract

suitably shaped metal nanostructures act as resonant optical antennas that efficiently collect light and confine it to a subwavelength volume. Vice versa, light emission from nano volumes can be enhanced by coupling to antenna structures. We give a short introduction to antenna theory and discuss recent experiments that show the feasibility of achieving strong field enhancement using resonant dipole antennas for near infrared wavelengths. By scanning an optical antenna fabricated at the apex of an aFM tip over individual quantum dots, we observe enhanced emission of the latter while it is in close proximity of the antenna feed gap. Resonant optical antennas hold promise to be applied for spectroscopic characterization of nano structures with high spatial resolutions and single-molecule sensitivity.

Numerical Modeling of Plasmonic Nanoantennas with Realistic 3D Roughness and Distortion

“…Nanoantennas rely on field enhancement due to plasmon coupling between paired metal nanostructures, such as bow-ties or paired ellipses [3,6,9–13], strips [8,14,15], rods [1,5,16–18], and other structures. The field enhancement is a key parameter for sensing applications.…”

Plasmonic nanoantenna arrays for the visible

“…Nanoantennas are also used in nanometer-scale optical lithography [14]. In most of the studies, the optical nanoantennas consist of paired metallic nanostructures including 2D structures such as metal strips [2,[15][16][17] and 3D structures such as nanorods [1,12,18], bow-tie particles [10,11,[19][20][21][22][23][24], nanodiscs [25,26], spheres [27], and other shapes like core-shell structures [28][29][30]. It has been shown theoretically and experimentally that such structures can produce strong resonance and large field enhancement.…”

On Super-Resolution versus Image Interpolation

“…1. We investigate four particles made of gold (Au) with different values of the parameter α= (1,2,3,4) where α is the polynomial order of the side variation. The polynomial function used to model the curvature of the sides is x=(y/k 1 ) α , where k 1 =L/2h 1/α , h=0.5L(3) 0.5 , L is the side length of the conventional bowtie triangle.…”