Fabrication and Characterization of Coupled Metal-Dielectric-Metal Nanoantennas

The authors fabricated two dimensional arrays of metal-dielectric-metal nanoantennas consisting of a thin layer of light-emitting polymers sandwiched between two Ag parallel cuboids and characterized them by measuring the optical transmission through the antenna arrays. The measured transmission spectra show two resonant dips. Numerical simulations reproduce the experimental results and show that the left dip is due to a cavity resonance mode and the right dip is due to the absorption of the polymer. With this vertical antenna design, the dielectric gap can be made much smaller with an extremely small mode volume, making it a potential candidate for single molecule studies using surface enhanced Raman scattering and for various other optoelectronic applications.