Luminescence engineering in plasmonic meta-surfaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how nanostructured plasmonic meta-surfaces can be engineered to control and significantly enhance photoluminescence in gold films, enabling tunable nanoscale light sources.

Contribution

It introduces a method to engineer the luminescence properties of gold nanostructures by controlling absorption and emission lines through nanostructuring, achieving a 76-fold emission enhancement.

Findings

Enhanced gold emission by a factor of 76

Controlled photoluminescence lines via nanostructuring

Potential for tunable nanoscale light sources

Abstract

Photoluminescence is a phenomenon of significant interest due to its wide range of technological applications in plasmonics, nanolasers, spasers, lasing spasers, loss compensation and gain in metamaterials, and luminescent media. Nanostructured materials are known to have very different luminescence characteristics to bulk samples or planar films. Here we show that by engineering a nanostructured meta-surface, we can choose the position of photoluminescence absorption and emission lines of thin gold films. The nanostructuring also aids to strong enhancement of the emission from gold, by a factor of 76 in our experiments. This enhancement is determined by the relative position of the engineered absorption and emission lines to the exciting laser wavelength and the intrinsic properties of the constituent material. These luminescence-engineered materials combined with a resonant material, as in the lasing spaser, or with the power of reconfigurable metamaterials promise huge potential as tunable nanoscale light sources.