Aperiodicity and disorder as systematic spectral tuning mechanisms for plasmonic nanostructures.

Abstract

We demonstrate how aperiodicity and disorder can be used as quantifiable mechanisms for tuning the spectral response of plasmonic nanostructure arrays. We tune the extinction spectra of these arrays using deterministically aperiodic (quasicrystal), perturbed lattice (Bernoulli point process, frozen phonon disorder, long-range frozen phonon disorder), negatively correlated (Strauss point process), and positively correlated (Log Gaussian Cox point process) assemblies. We quantify this tuning by considering the local variance of the extinction spectra, demonstrating two orders of magnitude of tunability. Our structures have potential applications in plasmonic or waveguide-based optoelectronic devices such as photovoltaics and photosensing, where spectral tuning is critical to performance.