ELECTRON-BEAM PATTERNING OF TEFLON AF FOR SURFACE PLASMON RESONANCE SENSING

Variable pressure electron beam etching and lithography for Teflon AF has been demonstrated. The relation between dose and etching depth is tested under high vacuum and water vapor. High resolution structures as small as 75 nm half-pitch have been resolved. Several simulation tools were tested for surface plasmon excitation. Grating based dual mode surface plasmon excitation has been shown numerically and experimentally

Surface Plasmon Excitation of Second Harmonic light: Emission and Absorption

We aim to clarify the role that absorption plays in nonlinear optical processes in a variety of metallic nanostructures and show how it relates to emission and conversion efficiency. We define a figure of merit that establishes the structure's ability to either favor or impede second harmonic generation. Our findings suggest that, despite the best efforts embarked upon to enhance local fields and light coupling via plasmon excitation, nearly always the absorbed harmonic energy far surpasses the harmonic energy emitted in the far field. Qualitative and quantitative understanding of absorption processes is crucial in the evaluation of practical designs of plasmonic nanostructures for the purpose of frequency mixing

Fano-type interpretation of red shifts and red tails in hole array transmission spectra

We present a unifying point of view which allows to understand spectral features reported in recent experiments with two-dimensional arrays of subwavelength holes in metal films. We develop a Fano analysis of the related scattering problem by distinguishing two interfering contributions to the transmission process, namely a non-resonant contribution (direct scattering) and a resonant contribution (surface plasmon excitation). The introduction of a coupling strength between these two contributions naturally induces resonance shifts and asymmetry of profiles which satisfy simple scaling relations. We also report an experiment to confirm this analysis.Comment: 5 page

Plasmon excitation by charged particles interacting with metal surfaces

Recent experiments (R. A. Baragiola and C. A. Dukes, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 76}, 2547 (1996)) with slow ions incident at grazing angle on metal surfaces have shown that bulk plasmons are excited under conditions where the ions do not penetrate the surface, contrary to the usual statement that probes exterior to an electron gas do not couple to the bulk plasmon. We here use the quantized hydrodynamic model of the bounded electron gas to derive an explicit expression for the probability of bulk plasmon excitation by external charged particles moving parallel to the surface. Our results indicate that for each ${\bf q}$ (the surface plasmon wave vector) there exists a continuum of bulk plasmon excitations, which we also observe within the semi-classical infinite-barrier (SCIB) model of the surface.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, o appear in Phys. Lett.