The intense surface plasmons (SPs) can be generated by patterned metal nano-structure arrays, through coupling incident light onto the functioned metal surface, so as to construct highly constrained surface electromagnetic modes. Therefore, a localized micro-nano-field array with a highly compressed surface electron distribution, can also be shaped and even nano-focused over the surface, which will lead to a lot of special physical effects such as anti-reflection effect, and thus indicate many new potential applications in the field of nano-photonics and -optoelectronics. In this paper, several typical patterned sub-wavelength metal nano-structure arrays were designed according to the process, in which common silicon wafer was employed as the substrate material and aluminum as the metal film with different structural size and arrangement circle. In addition, by adjusting the dielectric constant of metal material appropriately, the power control effect on metallic nanostructure was simulated. The key properties such as the excitation intensity of the surface plasmons were studied by simulating the reflectivity characteristic curves and the electric field distribution of the nanostructure excited by incident infrared beams. It is found that the angle of corners, the arrangement cycle and the metal material properties of the patterned nano-structures can be utilized as key factors to control the excitation intensity of surface plasmons.
With rapid advancement of infrared detecting technology in both military and civil domains, the photo-electronic performances of near-infrared detectors have been widely concerned. Currently, near-infrared detectors demonstrate some problems such as low sensitivity, low detectivity, and relatively small array scale. The current studies show that surface plasmons (SPs) stimulated over the surface of metallic nanostructures by incident light can be used to break the diffraction limit and thus concentrate light into sub-wavelength scale, so as to indicate a method to develop a new type of infrared absorber or detector with very large array. In this paper, we present the design and characterization of periodically patterned metallic nanostructures that combine nanometer thickness aluminum film with silicon wafer. Numerical computations show that there are some valleys caused by surface plasmons in the reflection spectrum in the infrared region, and both red shift and blue shift of the reflection spectrum were observed through changing the nanostructural parameters such as angle α and diameters D. Moreover, the strong E-field intensity is located at the sharp corner of the nano-structures.
In this paper, we propose a new device composed of patterned sub-wavelength arrays to investigate surface plasmons (SPs) over sub-wavelength metal nano-structures. The device consists of silicon substrate and sub-wavelength patterns fabricated on a layer of aluminum film with nanometer thickness. Each sub-wavelength pattern formed in aluminum film is composed of a basic nano-square and twelve triangles for shaping single nano-pattern, which are uniformly distributed on the four sides of each square. Reflectance spectra and electric field distribution in infrared region are simulated. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the device can efficiently lower its reflectance in infrared spectrum, and the response frequency can be controlled by only changing the device parameters such as square side length and then triangle vertex angle. Besides, the simulated electric field distribution of the device shows obviously field localization effect at the edges of aluminum film nano-structure. The electric filed around the tips of aluminum triangles is localized into sub-wavelength scale, so as to be beyond the common diffraction limitation. Our work will help to reveal the interesting properties of SPs device, and also bring new prospect of photonic device.
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