Investigation on surface plasmon polaritons and localized surface plasmon production mechanism in micro-nano structures

The simulation mechanism of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and localized surface plasmon (LSP) in different structures was studied, including the Au reflection grating (Au grating), Au substrate with dielectric ribbons grating (Au substrate grating), and pure electric conductor (PEC) substrate with Au ribbons grating (Au ribbons grating). And the characteristics of the Smith-Purcell radiation in these structures were presented. Simulation results show that SPPs are excited on the bottom surface of Au substrate grating grooves and LSP is stimulated on the upper surface both of Au ribbons grating grooves and Au grating grooves. Owing to the irreconcilable contradiction between optimizing the grating diffraction radiation efficiency and optimizing the SPPs excitation efficiency in the Au substrate grating, only 40-times enhancement of the radiation intensity was obtained by excited SPPs. However, the LSP enhanced structure overcomes the above problem and gains much better radiation enhancement ability, with about 200-times enhancement obtained in the Au ribbons grating and more than 500-times enhancement obtained in the Au grating. The results presented here provide a way of developing miniature, integratable, tunable, high-power-density radiation sources from visible light to ultraviolet rays at room temperature. © 2022 University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Publishing Services provided by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).