Nonreciprocal optical transmission through a single conical air hole in an Ag film

In this paper, we propose a simple metal micro-nano structure having the character of nonreciprocal optical zero-order transmission. The structure is a single conical air hole (CAH) in an Ag film whose optical absorption with geometric asymmetry breaks the time reversal symmetry of the electromagnetic field. By comparing the transmissions of Ag CAH with those of ideal conductor (IC) CAH, three effects of Ag CAH, including diffraction, Fabry-Perot-like (FPL) resonance and localized surface plasmon (LSP) resonance, are analyzed and discussed. Under optimized conditions, we find that the ratio of forward transmission to backward one can be larger than 9 at a proper wavelength in visible range. This kind of Ag CAH is expected to have the potential served as all-optical diode.