Ultrathin Nanostructured Metals for Highly Transmissive Plasmonic Subtractive Color Filters

Abstract

Plasmonic color filters employing a single optically-thick nanostructured metal layer have recently generated considerable interest as an alternative to colorant-based color filtering technologies, due to their reliability, ease of fabrication, and high color tunability. However, their relatively low transmission efficiency (~30%) needs to be significantly improved for practical applications. The present work reports, for the first time, a novel plasmonic subtractive color filtering scheme that exploits the counter-intuitive phenomenon of extraordinary low transmission (ELT) through an ultrathin nanostructured metal film. This approach relies on a fundamentally different color filtering mechanism than that of existing plasmonic additive color filters, and achieves unusually high transmission efficiencies of 60 ~ 70% for simple architectures. Furthermore, owing to short-range interactions of surface plasmon polaritons at ELT resonances, our design offers high spatial resolution color filtering with compact pixel size close to the optical diffraction limit (~λ/2), creating solid applications ranging from imaging sensors to color displays.

Fabrication of highly efficient resonant structure assisted ultrathin artificially stacked Ag/ZnS/Ag multilayer films for color filter applications

“…[30][31][32][33] More recently, plasmonic color filters were demonstrated by few research groups, where they exhibited filtering functionality in the visible range. 5,[34][35][36][37] However, to the best of our knowledge, the dependencies of the optical properties of Ag/ZnS/Ag with varying thickness of metal and dielectric layers have not been studied to date, even when such artificially stacked layers can play a key role in the design of color filters with high optical transmissivity. The configuration of proposed color filters is illustrated in Fig.…”

Aluminum Plasmonics Based Highly Transmissive Polarization-Independent Subtractive Color Filters Exploiting a Nanopatch Array

“…13−17 Plasmonic subtractive color filters (SCFs), permitting a transmission of 60%, were introduced by exploiting a one-dimensional (1D) grating on an ultrathin silver (Ag) film; however, they are subject to critical polarization sensitivity, which is unfavorable for imaging or sensing applications in which unpolarized or arbitrarily polarized light is usually involved. 18,19 The majority of previous works relying on plasmonic resonance preferentially adopted nanostructures made of noble metals, like gold (Au) and Ag. Unfortunately, devices in Au and Ag are hardly cost-effective owing to their incompatibility with the popular manufacturing scheme that incorporates complementary metal−oxide−semiconductor (CMOS) process.…”

“…22−26 Additional optimistic aspects of Al encompass natural abundance, neutral tint, broad resonance, high stability, high tolerance to fabrication process, and good adhesion to diverse platforms. 22−26 Taking into account both the aforementioned appeal of Al and the fact that SCFs have twice the photon throughput of red, green, and blue additive counterparts, ultimately providing elevated optical transmission and thus stronger color signals, 18 it would be highly desirable to develop polarization-independent Al-based SCFs, which has not been done to date.…”

Holographic Fabrication of 3D Nanostructures

“…Uniform 3D functional nanostructures underpin many fundamental and broad applications of the complete photo nic bandgaps (PBGs) and superprism effects in PCs, [80,81] negative index metamaterials [82][83][84][85][86] and broadband circular polarizers in metamaterials, [87] as well as plasmonic color filter, [88][89][90] and control of the flow in microfluidics systems. [71,91,92] Here, we focus on the fast-growing high-impact applications, such as 3D optical sensing devices and energy production and storage devices.…”