Resonant Transmission of Light through Dielectric-filled Nanowaveguides
Huizhong Xu, St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Physics; Undergraduate Student Researchers: Victor Garcia, Mary Grace Velasco, Spencer Mamer, Kimberly Singh, Nabila Hossain, Guangyue He, and Daniel Nikolov
Dielectric-filled nanowaveguides have recently been studied as an alternative approach of enhancing the incident intensity while maintaining nanoscale confinement. By conducting numerical simulations and experimental measurements, we demonstrate that efficient transmission of visible light through a 40-nm-diameter nanowaveguide filled with zinc oxide in a 100-nm-thick silver film can be obtained. The transmission spectrum displays a clear resonance where surface plasmons play an important role in enhancing transmission. We have also observed that the transmission resonance shifts with varying diameters of the zinc oxide nanowire, which is in good agreement with results from numerical simulations. The implications of these results in biomedical imaging applications will also be discussed.