Engineering plasmonic and dielectric directional nanoantennas

Optical and infrared antennas provide a promising way to couple photons in and out of nanoscale structures. As counterpart to conventional radio antennas, they are able to increase optical fields in sub-wavelength volumes, to enhance excitation and emission of quantum emitters or to direct light, radiated by quantum emitters. The directed emission of these antennas has been mainly pursued by surface plasmon based devices, e.g. Yagi-Uda like antennas, which are rather complicated due to the coupling of several metallic particles. Also, like all metallic structures in optical or infrared regime, these devices are very sensitive to fabrication tolerances and are affected by strong losses. It has been shown recently, that such directed emission can be accomplished by dielectric materials as well. In this paper we present an optimization of nanoscopic antennas in the near infrared regime starting from a metallic Yagi-Uda structure. The optimization is done via a particle-swarm algorithm, using full time domain finite integration simulations to obtain the characteristics of the investigated structure, also taking into account substrates. Furthermore we present a dielectric antenna, which performs even better, due to the lack of losses by an appropriate choice of the dielectric material. These antennas are robust concerning fabrication tolerances and can be realized with different materials for both the antenna and the substrate, without using high index materials.