Grating based plasmonic cavities

Abstract

Surface plasmon polaritons are dipole carrying electromagnetic excitations occur- ing at metal-dielectric interfaces. Metallic periodic structures exhibit modi¯ed transmission and re°ection spectra owing to the interaction of propagating SPPs with the periodicity. These periodic surfaces are used to demonstrate localiza- tion of propagating SPPs. Thin metallic ¯lms surrounded by Bragg re°ectors, selective loading of biharmonic metallic surfaces and Moire patterns are used to demonstrate plasmonic cavity formation. The quality factor, Q, a characteristic value that indicates rate of energy loss relative to the stored energy in the cavity is a crucial parameter for classifying these cavities. It was proposed that the Q factor should strongly depend on the surface geometry. However, there was not a sytematic study on the Q factor of these cavity structures. In this work, we report on a comparative study of grating based plasmonic band gap cavities. Numerically, we calculate the quality factors of the cavities based on three types of grating surfaces; uniform, biharmonic and Moirµe surfaces. Experimentally, we demonstrate the existence of plasmonic cavities based on uniform gratings. E®ective index perturbation and cavity geometries are obtained by additional dielectric loading. Furthermore, we fabricate 2D plasmonic structures, observe plasmonic band gaps in the symetry axis and propose cavity geometries for this structure.