Optical Transmission Enhancement and Tuning by Overylaying Liquid Crystals on a Gold Film with Patterned Nanoholes

Abstract

A gold film with subwavelength nanoholes on a glass substrate was fabricated through electron beam lithography and its extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) was characterized. By applying a liquid crystal overlayer to the gold film, its EOT can be further enhanced by~11% due to the refractive index matching of the dielectric media on its two sides. By controlling the alignment of the liquid crystal molecules, a highly reversible and reproducible tuning of the transmission peak in both intensity and position is demonstrated.

Light‐Driven Plasmonic Color Filters by Overlaying Photoresponsive Liquid Crystals on Gold Annular Aperture Arrays

“…In addition, we have also reported enhanced optical transmission ( > 10%) from a LC-overlayed gold nanohole array. [ 44 ] In this Communication, we demonstrate a light-driven plasmonic color fi lter by integrating a gold AAA with photoresponsive LCs. Compared to the as-milled AAAs, the overlayed ones by the photoresponsive LCs show much higher transmittance.…”

Waveguiding effect in 2D metal–dielectric–metal grating structure

“…Therefore, most of the light localizes at the top MDM layer. In addition, the surface plasmon momentum can match the momentum of the incident photon and the grating [12,13], thus enhancing the light coupling due to the surface plasmon resonances associated with the localized waveguide resonance [14]. At the bottom layer of the MDM structure, the resonant surface plasmons can re-radiate into photons when the momentum gap between plasmons and photons is bridged by the grating.…”

Active molecular plasmonics: tuning surface plasmon resonances by exploiting molecular dimensions

“…Stimulusinduced changes in the orientation of the director cause changes in the refractive index experienced by the incident light. Because of their switchable optical property and mature technology, LCs have been broadly applied to the field of AMP [69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]. A couple of examples are given below to illustrate the working principles based on different metal nanostructures and external stimuli.…”