Fabrication of black-gold coatings by glancing angle deposition with sputtering.

The fabrication of black-gold coatings using sputtering is reported here. Glancing angle deposition with a rotating substrate is needed to obtain vertical nanostructures. Enhanced light absorption is obtained in the samples prepared in the ballistic regime with high tilt angles. Under these conditions the diameter distribution of the nanostructures is centered at about 60 nm and the standard deviation is large enough to obtain black-metal behavior in the visible range.

Cloaking of solar cell contacts at the onset of Rayleigh scattering.

Electrical contacts on the top surface of solar cells and light emitting diodes cause shadow losses. The phenomenon of extraordinary optical transmission through arrays of subwavelength holes suggests the possibility of engineering such contacts to reduce the shadow using plasmonics, but resonance effects occur only at specific wavelengths. Here we describe instead a broadband effect of enhanced light transmission through arrays of subwavelength metallic wires, due to the fact that, in the absence of resonances, metal wires asymptotically tend to invisibility in the small size limit regardless of the fraction of the device area taken up by the contacts. The effect occurs for wires more than an order of magnitude thicker than the transparency limit for metal thin films. Finite difference in time domain calculations predict that it is possible to have high cloaking efficiencies in a broadband wavelength range, and we experimentally demonstrate contact shadow losses less than half of the geometric shadow.

Parallel collective resonances in arrays of gold nanorods.

In this work we discuss the excitation of parallel collective resonances in arrays of gold nanoparticles. Parallel collective resonances result from the coupling of the nanoparticles localized surface plasmons with diffraction orders traveling in the direction parallel to the polarization vector. While they provide field enhancement and delocalization as the standard collective resonances, our results suggest that parallel resonances could exhibit greater tolerance to index asymmetry in the environment surrounding the arrays. The near- and far-field properties of these resonances are analyzed, both experimentally and numerically.