September 21, 2010

Optical antennas can amplify signals by a million times or more

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Nature Nanotechnology - Optical rectification and field enhancement in a plasmonic nanogap


"An antenna is a metal structure that interacts with radiation, leading to the production of an oscillating voltage," said Rice Professor Doug Natelson. "In our situation, the electromagnetic waves are light (specifically at a wavelength of 785 nanometers in the experiment), and those light waves cause the electrons in our little metal electrodes to slosh around, producing a changing voltage across our nanogap. In that sense it really is an antenna, only for light, rather than for radio waves."

Sensors using the effect could sense even single molecules by harnessing the radiation intensity in the sub-nanometer gap between electrodes, which Rice measured to be "hundreds of thousands or millions of times higher than that from the incident laser," said Natelson. "For example, closely spaced metal nanoparticles have been used to enhance fields sufficiently in the interparticle gap to allow single-molecule Raman spectroscopy."


supplemental information (pdf)


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