We demonstrate a new near-field technology that uses a metallic probe in an optical disk. The metallic probe is produced in a focused spot on a readout layer composed of silver oxide. However the metallic probe is not transparent to far-field light, near-field light generated around it. Therefore, a mark of less than 100 nm in length could be recorded and reproduced by detecting the scattered light around the metallic probe and the mark.
A proposal for a photonic transistor is made and some basic proving experiments are described. These experiments show that by focusing two laser beams (405 and 635 nm) in one small spot on a high-speed rotating optical disk, a large signal enhancement is observed. It was found that a plasmon interaction generated between a silver light-scattering center and recorded small marks in the optical disk with a super-resolution near-field structure produced the large signal amplification in the spot (<1 μm). A modulated signal of the blue laser was enhanced by 60 times by controlling the red laser power from 1.5 to 3.5 mW. It has been shown that the system has the potential to realize all-thin-films photonic transistors by using local plasmon amplification.
We present results of reactively sputtered silver oxide thin films as a substrate material for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Herein, we show that deposited layers develop an increasingly strong SERS activity upon photoactivation at 488 nm. A benzoic acid/2-propanol solution was used to demonstrate that the bonding of molecules to SERS active sites at the surface can be followed by investigating temporal changes of the corresponding Raman intensities. Furthermore, the laser-induced structural changes in the silver oxide layers lead to a fluctuating SERS activity at high laser intensities which also affects the spectral features of amorphous carbon impurities.
The superresolution near-field structure (super-RENS) was proposed as an
alternative optical near-field recording technique last year. In this paper, our approach
and the basic principle of super-RENS are briefly reviewed, and the recent results
obtained by our group are described. As a result, it was found that the difference of the
dielectric layers influences the resolution limit of super-RENS, and the layers with a
compressive stress show the highest resolution until 60 nm. The aperture formation
mechanism was discussed under the condition of the energy balance between the layer
internal stress and the aperture formation free-energy. The principle and the dynamic
optical nonlinearities of a new super-RENS disk using silver-oxide are
also described.
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