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Sensors 2010, 10(9), 8751-8760; doi:10.3390/s100908751

Article

Characteristics of Metal Enhanced Evanescent-Wave Microcavities

Takashi Wakamatsu

Department of Electrical and Electronic System Engineering, Ibaraki National College of Technology, 866 Nakane, Hitachinaka, Ibaraki, Japan

Received: 27 July 2010; in revised form: 9 September 2010 / Accepted: 10 September 2010 / Published: 21 September 2010

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optical Resonant Microsensors)

Download PDF Full-Text [473 KB, uploaded 21 September 2010 11:48 CEST]

Abstract: This article presents the concept of storing optical energy using a metallic air gap microcavity. Evanescent waves are stored in the air gap of a dielectric/metal/air gap/metal planar microcavity. For an air gap with a micron scale distance between the two metals, incident light excites the optical interface modes on the two metal-air interfaces simultaneously, being accompanied by enhanced evanescent fields. Numerical simulations show that the reflected light depends remarkably upon distributions of the enhanced electric fields in the air-gap at the optical mode excitations. The metallic microcavities have a Q value on the order of 10², as determined from calculations. Experimentally, a small mechanical variation of the air-gap distance exhibited a change of reflectivity.

Keywords: resonant microcavity; evanescent wave; optical interface mode; light modulation

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