Nanopores: Plasmonic Nanopores in Metal‐Insulator‐Metal Films 6/2014)

Two different surface plasmon modes in a metal-insulator-metal coupled thin-film system are shown by A. B. Dahlin et al. on page 556. When the two metal films are brought into close proximity by a thin dielectric spacer, the bonding-mode surface plasmons hybridize and produce new modes with drastically different properties in terms of near-field distribution, dispersion relation, and propagation length. The nanopore array enables coupling to these modes, although the excitation is much more efficient for the higher-energy mode due to the nature of its charge distribution.