Plasmon hybridization engineering in self-organized anisotropic metasurfaces

The engineering of self-organized plasmonic metasurfaces is demonstrated using a maskless technique with defocused ion-beam sputtering and kinetically controlled deposition. The proposed reliable, cost-effective, and controllable approach enables large-area (order of square centimeter) sub-wavelength periodic patterning with close-packed gold nanostrips. A multi-level variant of the method leads to high-resolution manufacturing of vertically stacked nanostrip dimer arrays, without resorting to lithographic approaches. The design of these self-organized metasurfaces is optimized by employing plasmon hybridization methods. In particular, preliminary results on the so-called gap-plasmon configuration of the nanostrip dimers, implementing magnetic dipole resonance in the near-infrared range, are reported. This resonance offers a superior sensitivity and field enhancement, compared with the more conventional electric dipole resonance. The translational invariance of the nanostrip configuration leads to a high filling factor of the hot spots. These advanced features make the large-area metasurface based on gap-plasmon nanostrip dimers very attractive for surface-enhanced linear and nonlinear spectroscopy (e.g., surface-enhanced Raman scattering) and plasmon-enhanced photon harvesting in solar and photovoltaic cells.