Quantifying the impact of proximity error correction on plasmonic metasurfaces [Invited]

Plasmonic metasurfaces are often limited in their application by poor device performance, which is caused - in part - by deviations between fabricated devices and the ideal design. We show in this letter that these deviations are reduced significantly by shape-correction, intra-structure proximity error correction. We show experimentally that the fabrication fidelity alone is not a good indicator of the device quality and that direct measurements of the optical performance are necessary. Our fabrication improvements result in increased optical performance, reaching a measurement fidelity as high as 90%. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America