Linear scattering off a dynamically controlled nanosphere-mirror plasmonic antenna on a fiber taper

A quartz-tuning-fork shear-force microscope was used to demonstrate the gap size dependency of the resonance frequency for a nanosphere-mirror plasmonic antenna. The nanosphere was mounted at the end of a fiber taper scanning probe. A semi-transparent silicon film mirror was used to couple evanescent fields from incident light with the plasmonic antenna using an inverted optical microscope. The plasmon resonance spectra were acquired with a 0.4 nm-step gap size tuning resolution, and were confirmed by finite-difference time-domain simulations. The proposed technique provides a dynamic approach to tuning and detecting distance-dependent localized surface plasmon resonance with a sub-nanometer step resolution.