Trifolium nanocavity metasurfaces on single-crystal Au(111) for depth-tunable optical-variable reflection

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how trifolium-shaped nanocavity metasurfaces on single-crystal gold can be tuned for optical reflection by adjusting cavity depth, showing potential for advanced optical devices and anti-counterfeiting applications.

Contribution

It provides experimental insights into depth-dependent optical responses of trifolium nanocavities on gold, highlighting azimuth-dependent effects and potential applications.

Findings

Depth increase causes a redshift in reflection minima.

Structured gold surfaces exhibit broad, well-defined reflection bands.

The optical response is azimuth-dependent, unlike circular cavities.

Abstract

Symmetry-broken plasmonic nanocavities provide a simple route to engineer reflective optical response in continuous-metal metasurfaces. Here, we report an experimental study of trifolium-shaped nanocavity arrays milled into single-crystal Au(111) microplates and characterized by white-light reflection spectroscopy in the visible--near-infrared. The structured Au surfaces exhibit broad but well-defined reflection bands and pronounced low-reflectance regions that differ strongly from flat gold. We show that the optical response is highly sensitive to groove depth: increasing the cavity depth from $300$ nm to $350$ nm induces a clear redshift ($\sim 63$ nm) of the dominant long-wavelength minimum band ($\lambda = 700-800$ nm) and reshapes the intermediate spectral profile. In addition, the trifolium geometry shows a measurable azimuth-dependent response under sample rotation, unlike the azimuthally invariant behaviour often associated with circular groove cavities. These experimentally demonstrated properties directly support application directions in reflective structural colour, compact colour filtering, frequency-selective reflective surfaces, and optical-variable anti-counterfeiting features.