Exceptionally narrow plasmonic surface lattice resonances in gold nanohemisphere array

Plasmonic surface lattice resonances (SLRs) supported by metal nanoparticle arrays have a range of appealing characteristics such as extremely narrow linewidths and greatly enhanced near fields, and thus are attractive in diverse applications. Improving the quality factor of SLRs is important for many applications and thus it has been the focus in this field. In this work, we report high quality out-of-plane SLRs supported by two-dimensional metal nanohemisphere arrays embedded in a symmetric dielectric environment. These SLRs, excited under oblique incidence with TM polarization, can have an ultra-narrow resonant linewidth (similar to 0.9 nm) at visible wavelengths around 715 nm. This corresponds to an exceptionally high quality factor of 794, which is ten times that of the widely-adopted nanorods. We attribute this striking performance to the nanohemisphere geometry, which greatly relaxes the stringent requirement on the height of nanoparticles for supporting out-of-plane SLRs, reducing the absorption loss, and in which the out-of-plane oscillations are much stronger than in-plane ones, leading to stronger inter-particle coupling. The tuning of the resonance wavelength and the quality factor can be explained by a qualitative approach based on the detuning between the Rayleigh anomaly and the localized surface plasmon resonance of an isolated nanoparticle. We expect this work will advance the engineering and applications of high quality SLRs.