Surface Plasmon Excitation in Fibonacci Metal-Dielectric Multilayers

Abstract

We explore the interplay between surface plasmon excitations and quasiperiodicity theoretically by studying the optical properties of multilayer structures made of thin metal and dielectric layers and constructed using the Fibonacci quasiperiodic sequence. Using the invariant imbedding theory of wave propagation, we calculate the reflectance, transmittance and absorptance of p-polarized electromagnetic waves incident obliquely on Fibonacci metal-dielectric multilayers in the Otto configuration. We find that due to the excitation of surface plasmons, there appear several angles above the critical angle at which the reflectance takes local minima and the transmittance and the absorptance take local maxima. We observe that there are parameter regions where either transmission or absorption is anomalously large. As the generation number of the Fibonacci sequence increases, the curves converge to characteristic limiting curves. We find a surprising behavior that in some parameter region, the wave is completely absorbed by the Fibonacci structure. We examine this phenomenon by calculating the magnetic field distribution inside the Fibonacci structure.