UC Irvine

Plasmonic nano antennas like dimers, have been investigated for their capability to provide a strong near-field enhancement when illuminated by external light. Traditionally these nano antennas, isolated or arrayed, are placed on a substrate and used in spectroscopy techniques. Surfaces made of such plasmonic nano antennas have been very useful for applications like surface enhanced Raman scattering in which it provides various orders of magnitude of enhanced sensitivity. These instruments however are not economic and are often not mobile since surfaces require an external beam illumination and the Raman scattering is detected by a large aperture microscope. The goal of this paper is to combine nano antennas made of gold dimers with integrated waveguide to make a spectrometer which has low cost and volume in comparison with the structure mentioned above. A technique in which optical plasmonic nano antennas are located in proximity of silicon nitride waveguide is proposed that is useful both for illumination and detection channels. The waveguide evanescent field, which is decaying outside of the waveguide, excites the dimer and causes it to resonate which results in a very strong electric field enhancement of approximately 25 times in the antenna gap. Also the coupling effect of dimer resonance on waveguide modes is investigated. To show the efficiency of the proposed structure, full wave analysis has been done and its results are compared with the multilayer structure case. The simulation results demonstrate that this structure can be designed and fabricated for the purpose of spectroscopy application.