Elliptical gold nanowires: controlled fabrication and plasmonic Fabry–Pérot resonances

Abstract

Nanowires (NWs) are essential building blocks of photonic devices for guiding light waves. However, the controlled synthesis of non-circular NWs remains challenging. Herein, we develop a bottom-up approach for the fabrication of high-quality elliptical gold NWs with finely tuned geometry engineering by using an advanced ion-track template technology. Compared to ordinary NWs, the rotational symmetry breaking leads to highly polarization-dependent plasmonic responses. Modal analysis shows that the lowest dipolar HE1 mode splits into two branches where the attenuation of the long-range branch decreases by 40%, while the short-range branch has a stronger enhanced near-field. Novel, to the best of our knowledge, plasmonic Fabry–Pérot resonances on finite NWs are measured. Our method can be extended to fabricate non-circular NWs with other materials, holding potential for novel applications from quantum to collective scales.