Plasmonic Devices for Near and Far-Field Applications

  • Salma Alrasheed

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

Plasmonics is an important branch of nanophotonics and is the study of the interaction of electromagnetic fields with the free electrons in a metal at metallic/dielectric interfaces or in small metallic nanostructures. The electric component of an exciting electromagnetic field can induce collective electron oscillations known as surface plasmons. Such oscillations lead to the localization of the fields that can be at sub-wavelength scale and to its significant enhancement relative to the excitation fields. These two characteristics of localization and enhancement are the main components that allow for the guiding and manipulation of light beyond the diffraction limit. This thesis focuses on developing plasmonic devices for near and far-field applications. In the first part of the thesis, we demonstrate the detection of single point mutation in peptides from multicomponent mixtures for early breast cancer detection using selfsimilar chain (SCC) plasmonic devices that show high field enhancement and localization. In the second part of this work, we investigate the anomalous reflection of light for TM polarization for normal and oblique incidence in the visible regime. We propose gradient phase gap surface plasmon (GSP) metasurfaces that exhibit high conversion efficiency (up to ∼97% of total reflected light) to the anomalous reflection angle for blue, green and red wavelengths at normal and oblique incidence. In the third part of the thesis, we present a theoretical approach to narrow the plasmon linewidth and enhance the near-field intensity at a plasmonic dimer gap (hot spot) through coupling the electric localized surface plasmon (LSP) resonance of a silver hemispherical dimer with the resonant modes of a Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity. In the fourth part of this work, we demonstrate numerically bright color pixels that are highly polarized and broadly tuned using periodic arrays of metal nanosphere dimers on a glass substrate. In the fifth and final part of the thesis, we propose numerically an approach to narrow the plasmon linewidth and enhance the magnetic near field intensity at a magnetic hot spot in a hybridized metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure. The computational method used throughout the thesis is the finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD).
Date of AwardNov 30 2017
Original languageEnglish (US)
Awarding Institution
  • Physical Sciences and Engineering
SupervisorEnzo Di Fabrizio (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Plasmonics
  • Matamaterials
  • Nanophotonics
  • Optical Sensors
  • phased array

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