Double Fano resonant characteristics are investigated in planar plasmonic structure by embedding a metallic nanorod in symmetric U-shaped split ring resonators, which are caused by a strong interplay between a broad bright mode and narrow dark modes. The bright mode is resulted from the nanorod electric dipole resonance while the dark modes originate from the magnetic dipole induced by LC resonances. The overlapped dual Fano resonances can be decomposed to two separate ones by adjusting the coupling length between the nanorod and U-shaped split ring resonators. Fano resonances in the designed structure exhibit high refractive-index sensing sensitivity and figure of merit, which have potential applications in single or double-wavelength sensing in the near-infrared region.

Collective effects on thermophoresis of aqueous particle suspensions are studied experimentally and theoretically. A microfluidic device is used to characterize thermophoretic transport of 100 nm, 500 nm and 1 mm particles of various concentrations in deionized (DI) water. Our experimental findings show two interesting collective effects on the Soret coefficient of colloids: (i) for smaller particles (e.g., 100 nm and 500 nm), a sign change of the Soret coefficient is observed when increasing the particle concentration; (ii) for larger particles (e.g., 1 mm), a negative Soret coefficient is always seen. A model is derived to account for the collective effect on the thermophoresis of colloids using the well-known Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory that combines the van der Waals (VDW) attraction and the electric double layer (EDL) repulsion. Such DLVO interactions in an inhomogeneous particle suspension can exert an additional force on particles and thus modify the mass transport of particles under both temperature and concentration gradients and also alter the corresponding Soret coefficient.It is found that the proposed theoretical model can favorably explain our experimental observations.

A broad-band perfect absorber composing a two-dimensional periodic metal-dielectric-metal sandwiches array on dielectric/metal substrate is designed and numerically investigated. It is shown that the nearly-perfect absorption with a bandwidth of about 50 nm in visible region can be achieved by overlapping of two plasmon resonances: one originating from the coupling of electric dipoles between adjacent unit cells and another arising from magnetic dipole plasmon resonances. A capacitor-inductor circuit description is introduced to explain the dependence of resonance frequencies and band-width on geometrical parameters.

A novel planar plasmonic metamaterial for electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light characteristic is presented in this paper, which consists of nanoring and nanorod compound structures. Two bright modes in the metamaterial are induced by the electric dipole resonance inside nanoring and nanorod, respectively. The coupling between two bright modes introduces transparency window and large group index. By adjusting the geometric parameters of metamaterial structure, the transmittance of EIT window at 385 THz is about 60%, and the corresponding group index and Q factor can reach up to 1.2 × 10³ and 97, respectively, which has an important application in slow-light device, active plasmonic switch, SERS and optical sensing.

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Surface enhanced coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (SECARS) is a sensitive tool and promising for single molecular detection and chemical selective imaging. However, the enhancement factors (EF) were only 10~100 for colloidal silver and gold nanoparticles usually used as SECARS substrates. In this paper, we present a design of SECARS substrate consisting of three asymmetric gold disks and strategies for maximizing the EF by engineering near-field properties of the plasmonic Fano nanoassembly. It is found that the E-field “hot spots” corresponding to three different frequencies involved in SECARS process can be brought to the same spatial locations by tuning incident orientations, giving rise to highly confined SECARS “hot spots” with the EF reaching single-molecule sensitivity. Besides, an even higher EF of SECARS is achieved by introducing double Fano resonances in this plasmonic nanoassembly via further enlarging the sizes of the constituent disks. These findings put an important step forward to the plasmonic substrate design for SECARS as well as for other nonlinear optical processes.

A digital microfluidic dye laser that integrates a Fabry–Perot cavity with two fiber-based mirrors is shown to exhibit a single mode emission. In addition, fast switching is achieved via the alternation of droplet streams that contain two different dyes. Single-longitudinal-mode emission is observed for each dye wavelength (at 565 and 586 nm) with a linewidth narrower than 0.12 nm. This system appears thus well suited for on-chip spectroscopy and flow cytometry.

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