Calculated thickness dependent plasmonic properties of gold nanobars in the visible to near-infrared light regime.

Abstract

Metallic, especially gold, nanostructures exhibit plasmonic behavior in the visible to near-infrared light range. In this study, we investigate optical enhancement and absorption of gold nanobars with different thicknesses for transverse and longitudinal polarizations using finite element method simulations. This study also reports on the discrepancy in the resonance wavelengths and optical enhancement of the sharp-corner and round-corner nanobars of constant length 100 nm and width 60 nm. The result shows that resonance amplitude and wavelength have strong dependences on the thickness of the nanostructure as well as the sharpness of the corners, which is significant since actual fabricated structure often have rounded corners. Primary resonance mode blue-shifts and broadens as the thickess increases due to decoupling of charge dipoles at the surface for both polarizations. The broadening effect is characterized by measuring the full width at half maximum of the spectra. We also present the surface charge distribution showing dipole mode oscillations at resonance frequency and multimode resonance indicating different oscillation directions of the surface charge based on the polarization direction of the field. Results of this work give insight for precisely tuning nanobar structures for sensing and other enhanced optical applications.