A hybrid nanoantenna for highly enhanced directional spontaneous emission

Spontaneous emission modulated by a hybrid plasmonic nanoantenna has been investigated by employing finite-difference time-domain method. The hybrid nanoantenna configurations constituted by a gap hot-spot and of a plasmonic corrugated grating and a metal reflector sandwiching a SiO2 thin layer which appears promising for high spontaneous emission enhancement devices. Simulation assays show that the coupling between the gap-antenna and plasmonic corrugations reaches an ultra-high near-field enhancement factor in the excitation process. Moreover, concerning the emission process, the corrugations concentrate the far-field radiated power within a tiny angular volume, offering unprecedented collection efficiency. In the past decades, many kinds of optical antennas have been proposed and optimized to enhance single molecule detection. However, the excitation enhancement effect for single individual or dimmer plasmonic nanostructure is limited due to intrinsic nonradiative decay of the nanoparticle plasmon and quantum tunneling effect. The proposed hybrid configuration overwhelms the enhancement limit of single individual plasmonic structure. The findings provide an insight into spontaneous emission high enhancement through integrating the functions of different metallic nanostructures. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.