Surface Plasmon Enhancement Effect and Its Application to Near-Field Optical Recordin

We studied on enhanced photon-tunneling and the near-field enhancement effect for a nano-scale aperture with a concentric surface plasmon resonance structure. About two-orders larger light transmission and an enhanced near-field were achieved by optimizing the grating structures. This enhanced near -field was applied to optical recording, and about 100 -nm recorded patterns were successfully made on phase change media. This surface plasmon optics would open up the ultra-high-density recording technology.