An ultra-efficient energy transfer beyond plasmonic light scattering

Abstract

The energy transfer between nano-particles is of great importance for, solar cells, light-emitting diodes, nano-particle waveguides, and other photonic devices. This study shows through novel design and algorithm optimization, the energy transfer efficiency between plasmonic and dielectric nano-particles can be greatly improved. Using versatile designs including core-shell wrapping, supercells and dielectric mediated plasmonic scattering, 0.05 dB/mu m attenuation can be achieved, which is 20-fold reduction over the baseline plasmonic nano-particle chain, and 8-fold reduction over the baseline dielectric nano-particle chain. In addition, it is also found that the dielectric nanoparticle chains can actually be more efficient than the plasmonic ones, at their respective optimized geometry. The underlying physics is that although plasmonic nano-particles provide stronger coupling and field emission, the effect of plasmonic absorption loss is actually more dominant resulting in high attenuation. Finally, the group velocity for all design schemes proposed in this work is shown to be maintained above 0.4c, and it is found that the geometry optimization for transmission also boosts the group velocity. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.