Near-field localization of ultrashort optical pulses in transverse 1-D periodic nanostructures

Programmable field localization and enhancement effects on a non-structured planar surface with a permittivity gradient

We demonstrate electromagnetic field localization and enhancement effects on the non-structured planar surface of a two-dimensional gradient permittivity material. Surface plasmons are excited by a normally-incident Gaussian illumination beam and are confined to subwavelength rings on the surface of the gradient permittivity material. The performance of the surface is programmable by adjusting the permittivity distribution of the material and polarization of incident light. We show that field localization and enhancement effects can be realized at mid-infrared frequencies by conventional semiconductor materials with designed doping distributions. This demonstration suggests a compact and readily accessible platform for materials characterizations with spatially controlled illumination, providing a convenient approach to explore nanospectroscopy and light-matter interactions of nanomaterials, such as quantum dots, nanowires, and organic molecules.

Sub-10 nm near-field localization by plasmonic metal nanoaperture arrays with ultrashort light pulses

Near-field localization by ultrashort femtosecond light pulses has been investigated using simple geometrical nanoapertures. The apertures employ circular, rhombic, and triangular shapes to localize the distribution of surface plasmon. To understand the geometrical effect on the localization, aperture length and period of the nanoapertures were varied. Aperture length was shown to affect the performance more than aperture period due mainly to intra-aperture coupling of near-fields. Triangular apertures provided the strongest spatial localization below 10 nm in size as well as the highest enhancement of field intensity by more than 7000 times compared to the incident light pulse. Use of ultrashort pulses was found to allow much stronger light localization than with continuous-wave light. The results can be used for super-localization sensing and imaging applications where spatially localized fields can break through the limits in achieving improved sensitivity and resolution.

Electric field enhancement in guided-mode resonance filters

Electric fields inside guided-mode resonance filters (GMRFs) may be intensified by resonance effects. The electric field enhancement is investigated in two GMRFs: one is resonant at normal incidence, the other at oblique incidence. It is shown that the two GMRFs exhibit different behaviors in their electric enhancement. Differences between the electric field distributions of the two GMRFs arise because coupling between counterpropagating modes occurs in the first case. It is also shown that the order of the electric field of maximum amplitude can be controlled by modulation of the dielectric constant of the grating.

Dendritic nanowire ultraviolet laser array

Self-organized dendritic crystal growth is explored to assemble uniform semiconductor nanowires into highly ordered one-dimensional microscale arrays that resemble comb structures. The individual ZnO nanowires have uniform diameters ranging from 10 to 300 nm. They are evenly spaced on a stem with a regular periodicity of 0.1-2 micrometer. Under optical excitation, each individual ZnO nanowire serves as a Fabry-Perot optical cavity, and together they form a highly ordered nanowire ultraviolet laser array.

Analysis of enhanced second-harmonic generation in periodic nanostructures using modified rigorous coupled-wave analysis in the undepleted-pump approximation

We present an extension of the rigorous coupled-wave analysis technique to analyze second-harmonic generation (SHG) in periodic optical nanostructures in the undepleted-pump approximation. We apply this method to analyze SHG in two example nanostructures for which we predict enhanced nonlinearity due to transverse near-field localization of the fundamental optical field in the nonlinear material. First, we examine a periodic nanostructure that yields up to twice the transmitted SHG intensity output compared with the bulk nonlinear material but only for small nanostructure depths because of mismatch of the fundamental and second-harmonic mode phase velocities. Second, we develop and analyze a modified nanostructure and find that this nanostructure concurrently achieves transverse localization and phase matching for SHG. In principle, this permits an arbitrary coherent interaction length, and for several specific nanostructure depths we predict a transmitted SHG intensity output more than two orders of magnitude greater than that of the bulk material.