Fabrication and Characterization of Plasmonic Nanophotonic Absorbers and Waveguides

Plasmonics is a promising field of nanophotonics dealing with light interaction with metallic nanostructures. In such material systems, hybridization of photons and collective free-electron oscillation can result in sub-wavelength light confinement. The strong light-matter interaction can be harnessed for, among many applications, high-density photonic integration, metamaterial design, enhanced nonlinear optics, sensing etc. In the current thesis work, we focus on experimental fabrication and characterization of planar plasmonic metamaterials and waveguide structures. The samples are fabricated based on the generic electron beam lithography and characterizations are done with our home-made setups. Mastering and refinement of fabrication techniques as well as setting up the characterization tools have constituted as a major part of the thesis work. In particular, we experimentally realized a plasmonic absorber based on a 2D honeycomb array of gold nano-disks sitting on top of a reflector through a dielectric spacer. The absorber not only exhibits an absorption peak which is owing to localized surface plasmon resonance and is insensitive to incidence’s angle or polarization, but also possesses an angleand polarization-sensitive high-order absorption peak with a narrow bandwidth. We also demonstrated that the strong light absorption in such plasmonic absorbers can be utilized to photothermally re-condition the geometry of gold nanoparticles. The nearly perfect absorption capability of our absorbers promises a wide range of potential applications, including thermal emitter, infrared detectors, and sensors etc. We also fabricated a plasmonic strip waveguide in a similar metal-insulator-metal structure. The strip waveguide has a modal confinement slightly exceeding that of the so-called plasmonic slot waveguide. We further thermally annealed the waveguide. It is observed that the propagation loss at 980 nm has been decreased significantly, which can be attributed to the improvement in gold quality after thermal annealing.