Simulation of the emission properties of patterned metal-based nanostructures

Enormous pressures have been puts on current optical storage technologies as the rapid development of information technologies. Recently, it has been found that the surface plasmon–polaritons'modes (SPPMs) in metallic nanostructures may lead to the high localization of guided light beams with nanometer size and only limited by several factors such as atomic structure, dissipation, and light dispersion, and thus far beyond the common diffraction limit of electromagnetic waves in dielectric media. This discovery provides a way to produce nanoscale light signal and thus makes a significant breakthrough in optical storage technologies. In this paper, our work focuses on the modeling and simulation of particular kinds of patterned metal-based nanostructure fabricated over silicon dioxide (SiO2) wafer. The nanostructures designed are expected to concentrate, deliver incident light energy into nanoscale regions and generate nanoscale light signal. In our research, the duty cycle of patterned nanostructures is taken as a key parameter, and then the factors including the patterned nanostructures, the frequency of the incident electromagnetic wave, the size of patterned nanostructure and the distance arrangement between adjacent single patterns, are taken as variables. The common CST microwave studio is used to simulate beam transportation and transformation behaviors. By comparing electric-field intensity distribution in nano-areas and the reflectance of the nanostructure array, the nano-light-emission effects are analyzed.