Perforated Semishells: Far-Field Directional Control and Optical Frequency Magnetic Response

Reduced-symmetry plasmonic nanostructures can be designed to support a range of novel optical phenomena, such as nanoscale control of the far-field scattering profile and magnetic resonances at optical frequencies. A family of reduced-symmetry nanostructures--plasmonic semishells with specifically shaped and oriented perforations introduced into the metallic shell layer--can be tailored to control these effects. Unlike core-shell nanoparticles, perforated semishells can be fabricated using a combination of clean-room techniques. For a semishell with a single spherical perforation positioned on its symmetry axis, we examine how the resonant modes of the structure depend on hole size and shape. Placing the perforation off the symmetry axis allows a family of higher-order modes to be excited in the nanostructure, along with complex near-field charge distributions for the various resonant modes. This reduced-symmetry case provides a platform for optical studies, which agree quite well with theoretical analysis. Our study also examines two important variations of this structure: a semishell with multiple perforations in the shell layer, and a semishell with a wedge-like "slice" in the shell layer. A semishell with a wedge-like perforation can be thought of as a three-dimensional analogue of a split-ring resonator (SRR), an important nanoscale component in metamaterial design. Here we show that the dimensions of the wedge-like perforation, which control the effective optical frequency resistance, inductance, and capacitance of this structure, determine the frequency of the magnetic mode.