Tunneling Mechanism of Light Transmission through Metallic Films

Abstract

A mechanism of light transmission through metallic films is proposed, assisted by tunneling between resonating buried dielectric inclusions. This is illustrated by arrays of Si spheres embedded in Ag. Strong transmission peaks are observed near the Mie resonances of the spheres. The interaction among various planes of spheres and interference effects between these resonances and the surface plasmons of Ag lead to mixing and splitting of the resonances. Transmission is proved to be limited only by absorption. For small spheres, the effective dielectric constant of the resulting material can be tuned to values close to unity, and a method is proposed to turn the resulting materials invisible.

Shape resonance omni-directional terahertz filters with near-unity transmittance

“…Recently the concept of surface plasmons have been extended to include perfect metals [9][10][11][12][13], thereby encompassing any phenomena involving strong surface electric field in microwave and terahertz frequency range [14,15]. Strong surface field and its scattering into the far field can result in strong transmission, as has been predicted by many theoretical groups [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. In this paper, we demonstrate shape resonance terahertz filters with near-unity transmission through various plasmonic structures with diverse hole shapes where we can easily control the transparent frequencies through hole shapes [24][25][26][27][28], incident angle [29], and polarization direction [30].…”

Fundamental Role of Periodicity and Geometric Shape to Resonant Terahertz Transmission

“…Until now, a few groups have theoretically predicted the perfect transmission [59][60][61][62][63][64] and experimentally observed the near-unity transmission [65][66][67] in the plasmonic structures with periodic arrays of slits and holes. However, despite great progresses in realizing the perfect transmission, we do not have the clear understanding of what are the relative contributions of the geometric shape and the periodicity effects toward the perfect transmission in specific conditions.…”

Optics of subwavelength gradient nanofilms

“…During the last decade the interest into optics of thin films is strengthened by the overall attention towards the tunneling phenomena [35] and, especially, by the tunneling of photons through nanostructured metal films [36]. The enhanced optical transmittance of these periodical structures, supported by surface plasmon polariton modes in metal nanofilms [37], was shown to be an effective mechanism for resonant transfer of EM energy in optoelectronic devices [38].…”