Materials design of vertically coupled plasmonic arrays

Plasmonic metasurfaces have important applications in life science, optics, and catalysis. However, their industrial usage is limited by the challenges of high throughput nanofabrication. A promising solution is the transfer of a pattern into a substrate using block copolymers, nanostructured stamps or molds to create binary, three dimensional templates, which can then be decorated with plasmonically active metals. Here, we report on the optical properties of quasi-Babinet complementary arrays in the non-retarded regime investigated by finite-difference time-domain simulations. The structures consist of a nanopillar support, which is covered with metal disks on top of the pillars and a quasi-Babinet complementary hole array film at the base of the pillars. Strong vertical plasmonic coupling occurs for small separation distances of the plasmonic slabs. We present a comprehensive study of the near and far-field properties of such vertically coupled plasmonic arrays varying their critical geometric dimension and the employed metals with their intrinsic plasmonic material properties. In particular, we consider gold, silver, copper, aluminum, nickel, and palladium. Furthermore, the effect of the refractive index n of the nanopillar support between the range of n = 1.4 to n = 3.4 is investigated. The plasmonic slabs show tunable extraordinary transmission and large electric near-field enhancements, which are strongly dependent on the employed material and geometry. Further, we show that the templates are suitable for plasmonic heterostructures commonly used in plasmon-enhanced photocatalysis.