Optical near-field effects for submicron patterning and plasmonic optical devices

Metallic films with narrow and deep subwavelength gratings or holes having a converging-diverging channel (CDC) can exhibit enhanced transmission resonances for wavelengths larger than the periodicity of the grating or hole. Using the finite element method, it is shown that by varying the gap size at the throat of a CDC, the spectral locations of the transmission resonance bands can be shifted close to each other and have high transmittance in a very narrow energy band. Additionally, the transmission of light can be influenced by the presence of the externally applied magnetic field H. The spectral locations of the transmission peak resonances depend on the magnitude and the direction of H. The transmission peaks have blue-shift with the increase in H. A new multilayer thermal emitter has been analyzed in the visible wavelength range. The proposed emitter has large temporal and spatial coherence extending into the far field. The thermal emitter is made up of a cavity that is surrounded by a thin silver grating having a CDC on one side and a one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystal (PhC) on the other side. The large coherence length is achieved by making use of the coherence properties of the surface waves. Due to the nature of surface waves the new multilayer structure can attain the spectral and directional control of emission with only ppolarization. The resonance condition inside the cavity is extremely sensitive to the wavelength, which would then lead to high emission in a very narrow wavelength band. In addition a new tunable plasmonic crystal (tPLC) was proposed, where the plasmonic or polaritonic mode of a metallic array can be combined with the photonic mode of a hole array in a dielectric slab for achieving negative refraction and still posses an extra degree of freedom for tuning the tPLC as a superlens to operate at different frequencies. The tunability of the single planar tPLC slab is demonstrated numerically for subwavelength imaging (FWHM 0.38[lambda]~ 0.42[lambda]) by just varying the fluid in the hole array, thereby enabling the realization of ultracompact tunable superlens and paving the way for a new class of lens. An aggressive pursuit for decreasing the minimum feature size in high bandgap materials has lead to various challenges in nanofabrication. However, it is difficult to achieve critical dimensions at sub-wavelength scale using traditional optical lithography. A new technique to create submicron patterns on hard-to-machine materials like silicon carbide (SiC) and borosilicate glass with a laser beam is demonstrated. Here the principle of optical near-field enhancement between the spheres and substrate when irradiated by a laser beam has been used for obtaining the patterning.