Bongseok Choi

Dual-band infrared metasurface thermal emitter for CO2 sensing

Polarization- and angle-independent, dual-band metasurface thermal emitter was developed. The metasurface emits radiation at 4.26 μm and 3.95 μm, conventionally used for CO2 sensing. The metasurface is based on a planar Au/Al2O3/Au structure, in which orthogonal rectangular Au patches are arrayed alternately, and generates nearly perfect blackbody radiation with an emittance as high as 0.97. The metasurface is integrated on a resistive heater mounted on a SiN membrane, so that the infrared waves are produced by applying a voltage. The metasurface emitter was incorporated into an actual CO2 sensing system and was demonstrated to reduce the electric power needed by about 30% compared with a conventional blackbody emitter by suppressing unnecessary radiation.

Photoluminescence-enhanced plasmonic substrates fabricated by nanoimprint lithography

Abstract. We fabricated large-area stacked complementary plasmonic crystals (SC PlCs) by employing ultraviolet nanoimprint lithography. The SC PlCs were made on silicon-on-insulator substrates consisting of three layers: the top layer contacting air was a perforated Au film, the bottom layer contacting the buried oxide layer included an Au disk array corresponding to the holes in the top layer, and the middle layer was a Si photonic crystal slab. The SC PlCs have prominent resonances in optical wavelengths. It is shown that the fabricated PlCs were precise in structure and uniform in their optical properties. We examined the photoluminescence (PL) enhancement of monolayer dye molecules on the SC PlC substrates in the visible range and found large PL enhancements of up to a 100-fold in comparison with dye molecules on nonprocessed Si wafers.

Heteroplasmon Hybridization in Stacked Complementary Plasmo-Photonic Crystals

We constructed plasmo-photonic crystals in which efficient light-trapping, plasmonic resonances couple with photonic guided resonances of large density of states and high-quality factor. We have numerically and experimentally shown that heteroplasmon hybrid modes emerge in stacked complementary (SC) plasmo-photonic crystals. The resonant electromagnetic-field distributions evidence that the two hybrid modes originate from two different heteroplasmons, exhibiting a large energy splitting of 300 meV. We further revealed a series of plasmo-photonic modes in the SC crystals.

Selective Plasmonic Enhancement of Electric- and Magnetic-Dipole Radiations of Er Ions.

Lanthanoid series are unique in atomic elements. One reason is because they have 4f electronic states forbidding electric-dipole (ED) transitions in vacuum and another reason is because they are very useful in current-day optical technologies such as lasers and fiber-based telecommunications. Trivalent Er ions are well-known as a key atomic element supporting 1.5 μm band optical technologies and also as complex photoluminescence (PL) band deeply mixing ED and magnetic-dipole (MD) transitions. Here we show large and selective enhancement of ED and MD radiations up to 83- and 26-fold for a reference bulk state, respectively, in experiments employing plasmonic nanocavity arrays. We achieved the marked PL enhancement by use of an optimal design for electromagnetic (EM) local density of states (LDOS) and by Er-ion doping in deep subwavelength precision. We moreover clarify the quantitative contribution of ED and MD radiations to the PL band, and the magnetic Purcell effect in the PL-decay temporal measurement. This study experimentally demonstrates a new scheme of EM-LDOS engineering in plasmon-enhanced photonics, which will be a key technique to develop loss-compensated and active plasmonic devices.

Large-Area resonance-tuned metasurfaces for on-demand enhanced spectroscopy

We show an effective procedure for lateral structure tuning in nanoimprint lithography (NIL) that has been developed as a vertical top-down method fabricating large-area nanopatterns. The procedure was applied to optical resonance tuning in stacked complementary (SC) metasurfaces based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates and was found to realize structure tuning at nm precision using only one mold in the NIL process. The structure tuning enabled us to obtain fine tuning of the optical resonances, offering cost-effective, high-throughput, and high-precision nanofabrication. We also demonstrate that the tuned optical resonances selectively and significantly enhance fluorescence (FL) of dye molecules in a near-infrared range. FL intensity on a SC metasurface was found to be more than 450-fold larger than the FL intensity on flat Au film on base SOI substrate.

Subnanomolar fluorescent-molecule sensing by guided resonances on nanoimprinted silicon-on-insulator substrates

We have produced nanoimprinted silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates with high precision and applied them for fluorescence (FL) enhancement of typical dye molecules of Rhodamine series. We experimentally found that the FL signals on the nanoimprinted SOI substrates are enhanced by more than 200 fold as compared with the signals on Si wafers. The FL enhancement mechanism was investigated using spectroscopic and theoretical approaches. The results indicated that guided resonances with large density of states significantly contribute to the FL enhancement. We also substantiated that the FL-enhancing substrates well serve as rapid-sensing platforms for a very dilute FL-molecule solution with subnanomolar concentration. The nanoimprinted SOI substrates were repeatedly reused without degradation.

Ultraviolet-nanoimprinted packaged metasurface thermal emitters for infrared CO2 sensing

Abstract Packaged dual-band metasurface thermal emitters integrated with a resistive membrane heater were manufactured by ultraviolet (UV) nanoimprint lithography followed by monolayer lift-off based on a soluble UV resist, which is mass-producible and cost-effective. The emitters were applied to infrared CO2 sensing. In this planar Au/Al2O3/Au metasurface emitter, orthogonal rectangular Au patches are arrayed alternately and exhibit nearly perfect blackbody emission at 4.26 and 3.95 μm necessary for CO2 monitoring at the electric power reduced by 31%. The results demonstrate that metasurface infrared thermal emitters are almost ready for commercialization.

High-performance metasurface polarizers with extinction ratios exceeding 12000

High-performance ultrathin polarizers have been experimentally demonstrated employing stacked complementary (SC) metasurfaces, which were produced using nanoimprint lithography. It is experimentally determined that the metasurface polarizers composed of Ag and Au have large extinction ratios exceeding 17000 and 12000, respectively, in spite of the subwavelength thickness. It is also shown that the ultrathin polarizers of the SC structures are optimized at telecommunication wavelengths.

Configuration interaction on plasmo-photonic metasurfaces controlling optical transitions

Enhanced optical transitions in fluorescent molecules are clearly chosen on a new metasurface platform enabling configuration interaction of the molecules with plasmo-photonic resonant modes. Metal-molecule interface is crucial to select the enhanced transitions.

Emission-enhanced plasmonic substrates fabricated by nano-imprint lithography

We fabricated large-area stacked complementary plasmonic crystals (SC PlCs) by employing ultra-violet (UV) nanoimprint lithography (NIL). The SC PlCs was made on silicon on insulator (SOI) substrates, consisting of three layers: the top layer contacting air was perforated Au film, the bottom layer contacting buried oxide (BOX) layer included Au disk array corresponding to the holes in the top layer, and the middle layer was Si photonic crystal slab. The SC PlCs have prominent resonances in the optical wavelengths. It is shown that the fabricated PlCs were precisely made in structure and well uniform in the optical properties. We have examined photoluminescence (PL) enhancement of dye molecules on the SC PlC substrates in the visible range and found large enhancement up to 100-fold in comparison with the dye molecules on non-processed Si wafers.