Plasmonic Nanostructures: Fabrication And Optical Characterization

Abstract

Resonant light localization by metal nanostructures has potential for applications in cavity quantum electrodynamics (e.g. single-photon sources, quantum gates etc) and nonlinear optics. In this thesis we present the fabrication details of metal nanocavities in silver films deposited on glass substrates. We discuss the details of the thin film deposition techniques which we used as well as the focused ion beam milling method for drawing nanopatterns on silver films. We also present our studies on optical characterization of gold nano particles on glass substrate showing surface plasmon resonance. We present our theoretical model of this phenomenon using Mie theory and compare it to our experimental results.