Strongly coupled, high-quality plasmonic dimer antennas fabricated using a sketch-and-peel technique

Abstract

A combination of helium- and gallium-ion beam milling together with a fast and reliable sketch-and-peel technique is used to fabricate gold nanorod dimer antennas with an excellent quality factor and with gap distances of less than 6 nm. The high fabrication quality of the sketch-and-peel technique compared to a conventional ion beam milling technique is proven by polarisation-resolved linear dark-field spectromicroscopy of isolated dimer antennas. We demonstrate a strong coupling of the two antenna arms for both fabrication techniques, with a quality factor of more than 14, close to the theoretical limit, for the sketch-and-peel–produced antennas compared to only 6 for the conventional fabrication process. The obtained results on the strong coupling of the plasmonic dimer antennas are supported by finite-difference time-domain simulations of the light-dimer antenna interaction. The presented fabrication technique enables the rapid fabrication of large-scale plasmonic or dielectric nanostructures arrays and metasurfaces with single-digit nanometer scale milling accuracy.

Keywords

• helium-ion beam lithography
• sketch and peel
• plasmonic nanostructures
• single-particle dark-field spectroscopy
• strong coupling
• quality factor
• near-field enhancement