TY - JOUR
T1 - Finite-difference time-domain analysis of hydrogenated amorphous silicon and aluminum surface plasmon waveguides
AU - Lourenço, Paulo
AU - Fantoni, Alessandro
AU - Fernandes, Miguel
AU - Vygranenko, Yuri
AU - Vieira, Manuela
N1 - The authors are grateful to the Luso-American Development Foundation that founded this work through the program Papers@USA_grants’2018, the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology through grant SFRH/BPD/ 102217/2014 and to Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa through the projects IPL IDI&CA 2017 Exowave and IPL IDI&CA 2017 EmGraph. This article is an extended version of https:// doi.org/10.1117/12.2290721 presented at SPIE Photonics West 2018.
PY - 2018/7/1
Y1 - 2018/7/1
N2 - The large majority of surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based devices use noble metals, namely gold or silver, in their manufacturing process. These metals present low resistivity, which leads to low optical losses in the visible and near-infrared spectrum ranges. Gold shows high environmental stability, which is essential for long-term operation, and the lower stability of silver can be overcome through the deposition of an alumina layer, for instance. However, their high cost is a limiting factor if the intended target is large-scale manufacturing. This work considers a cost-effective approach through the selection of aluminum as the plasmonic material and hydrogenated amorphous silicon instead of its crystalline counterpart. This SPR structure relies on Fano resonance to improve its response to refractive index deviations of the surrounding environment. Fano resonance is highly sensitive to slight changes of the medium, hence the reason we incorporated this interference phenomenon in the proposed sensing structure. We report the results obtained when conducting finite-difference time-domain algorithm-based simulations on this metal-dielectric-metal structure when the active metal is aluminum, gold, and silver. Then, we evaluate their sensitivity, detection accuracy, and resolution. The obtained results for our proposed sensing structure show good linearity and similar parameter performance as the ones obtained when using gold or silver as plasmonic materials.
AB - The large majority of surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based devices use noble metals, namely gold or silver, in their manufacturing process. These metals present low resistivity, which leads to low optical losses in the visible and near-infrared spectrum ranges. Gold shows high environmental stability, which is essential for long-term operation, and the lower stability of silver can be overcome through the deposition of an alumina layer, for instance. However, their high cost is a limiting factor if the intended target is large-scale manufacturing. This work considers a cost-effective approach through the selection of aluminum as the plasmonic material and hydrogenated amorphous silicon instead of its crystalline counterpart. This SPR structure relies on Fano resonance to improve its response to refractive index deviations of the surrounding environment. Fano resonance is highly sensitive to slight changes of the medium, hence the reason we incorporated this interference phenomenon in the proposed sensing structure. We report the results obtained when conducting finite-difference time-domain algorithm-based simulations on this metal-dielectric-metal structure when the active metal is aluminum, gold, and silver. Then, we evaluate their sensitivity, detection accuracy, and resolution. The obtained results for our proposed sensing structure show good linearity and similar parameter performance as the ones obtained when using gold or silver as plasmonic materials.
KW - Fano interference
KW - finite-difference time-domain simulations
KW - photonics
KW - surface plasmon resonance
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85050660201&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1117/1.OE.57.7.077103
DO - 10.1117/1.OE.57.7.077103
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85050660201
SN - 0091-3286
VL - 57
JO - Optical Engineering
JF - Optical Engineering
IS - 7
M1 - 077103
ER -