Coaxial Aperture Arrays Produced by Ultrafast Direct Femtosecond Laser Processing with Spatially Multiplexed Cylindrical Vector Beams

Direct femtosecond laser printing was used to fabricate circular-and coaxial-shaped hole arrays at ultrafast printing rate up to 106 elements per second. To achieve such fast printing rate, we implemented a spatial multiplexing of either a single Gaussian or cylindrical vector beams into linear array of identical laser spots. Being compared to ordinary microholes, the coaxial openings arranged at the same periodicity demonstrate enhanced transmission in the mid-IR spectral range resulted from coupling between localized electromagnetic mode supported by coaxial unit cell and the lattice-type surface plasmon resonance. At optimized geometry of the coaxial openings and their arrangement we demonstrated resonant transmission as high as 92% at wavelengths ranging from 7.5 to 9 μm. This makes the coaxial microhole arrays with tailored spectral properties produced with ultrafast and inexpensive direct laser printing promising for sensing applications based on surface enhanced infrared absorption.

Extraordinary optical transmission and second harmonic generation in sub–10-nm plasmonic coaxial aperture

Recent development in nanofabrication technology has enabled the fabrication of plasmonic nanoapertures that can provide strong field concentrations beyond the diffraction limit. Further utilization of plasmonic nanoaperture requires the broadband tuning of the operating wavelength and precise control of aperture geometry. Here, we present a novel plasmonic coaxial aperture that can support resonant extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) with a peak transmittance of ~10% and a wide tuning range over a few hundred nanometers. Because of the shadow deposition process, we could precisely control the gap size of the coaxial aperture down to the sub–10-nm scale. The plasmonic resonance of the SiNx/Au disk at the center of the coaxial aperture efficiently funnels the incident light into the sub–10-nm gap and allows strong electric field confinement for efficient second harmonic generation (SHG), as well as EOT. In addition to the experiment, we theoretically investigated the modal properties of the plasmonic coaxial aperture depending on the structural parameters and correlation between EOT and SHG through finite-difference time-domain simulations. We believe that our plasmonic coaxial apertures, which are readily fabricated by the nanoimprinting process, can be a versatile, practical platform for enhanced light–matter interaction and its nonlinear optical applications.