Sharp selective scattering of red, green and blue light achieved via gain material's loss compensation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that introducing gain material into metallic nanoparticle structures significantly enhances their ability to selectively scatter red, green, and blue light, overcoming losses and broadening resonance peaks.

Contribution

It presents a numerical simulation study showing how gain materials improve the selective scattering performance of metallic nanostructures for RGB light.

Findings

Gain materials greatly improve performance for Ag and Au structures.

Core-shell silica@Au, silica@Ag, and Ag@silica structures are optimal.

Aluminum-based structures do not benefit from gain materials.

Abstract

For a transparent projection screen based on metallic nanoparticle's localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), in the ideal case the metallic nanoparticles dispersed in a transparent matrix only selectively scatter red, green and blue light and transmit the visible light of other colours. However, metal's optical loss and size effect at nanoscale degenerate the desired performance by broadening the resonance peak width and increasing the absorption ratio. In this work, it is shown that the problem can be solved by introducing gain material. Numerical simulations are performed on nanostructures based on silver (Ag), gold (Au) or aluminium (Al) with or without gain material, to examine the effect of gain material and to search for suitable structures for sharp selective scattering of red, green and blue light. And it is found that introducing gain material greatly improves performance of the structures based on Ag or Au except the structures based on Al. The most suitable structures for sharp selective scattering of red, green and blue light are respectively found to be the core-shell structures of silica@Au, silica@Ag and Ag@silica, all with gain material.