Plasmonic Metasurfaces with Quality Factors Up to 790 in the Visible Regime

Plasmon metasurfaces supporting surface lattice resonances (SLRs) have emerged as an exciting platform for manipulating nanoscale light-matter interactions in expanding applications. Although great progress has been achieved, the quality factors of plasmonic metasurfaces remain quite limited especially in the visible regime, hindering practical applications. This study reports an SLR-based plasmonic metasurface with an ultrahigh quality factor that reaches 1427 in theory and 790 in experiments at 712 nm, a 240% increase over the state of the art. The quality factor of the out-of-plane SLR in periodic gold or silver nanorods is augmented by an order of magnitude through reducing the nanorod height from 100 to 50 nm. With these findings, this work is expected to pave the way for realizing high-performance nanolasers, nonlinear frequency converters, and biosensors based on ultrahigh-Q plasmonic metasurfaces.

Automated summary

This study reports an ultrahigh-Q plasmonic metasurface with an SLR-based design that achieves an ultrahigh quality factor of 1427 theoretically and 790 experimentally at 712 nm, representing a 240% improvement over the state of the art. The quality factor of the out-of-plane SLR in periodic gold or silver nanorods is greatly enhanced by reducing the nanorod height from 100 to 50 nm. These findings are expected to enable the development of high-performance nanolasers, nonlinear frequency converters, and biosensors based on ultrahigh-Q plasmonic metasurfaces.