Departmental Papers (ESE)
Abstract
We fabricate and characterize a metal-dielectric nanostructure with an effective refractive index n=0 in the visible spectral range. Light is excited in the material at deep subwavelength resolution by a 30-keV electron beam. From the measured spatially and angle-resolved emission patterns, a vanishing phase advance, corresponding to an effective ϵ=0 and n=0, is directly observed at the cutoff frequency. The wavelength at which this condition is observed can be tuned over the entire visible or near-infrared spectral range by varying the waveguide width. This n=0 plasmonic nanostructure may serve as a new building block in nanoscale optical integrated circuits and to control spontaneous emission as experimentally demonstrated by the strongly enhanced radiative optical density of states over the entire n=0 structure.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
1-2-2013
Date Posted: 09 May 2013
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Vesseur, E. J. R., Coenen, T., Caglayan, H., Engheta, N., & Polman, A. (2013). Experimental Verification of n = 0 Structures for Visible Light. Physical Review Letters, 110(1), 013902. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.013902
© 2013 American Physical Society