Plane wave scattering from a plasmonic nanowire array spacer-separated from a plasmonic film

In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of the electromagnetic response of a plasmonic nanowire–spacer–plasmonic film system. The analytical solution presented in this paper is a full-wave solution, which is used to compute the fields scattered by the plasmonic nanostructure system on illumination by a plane electromagnetic wave. The physical structure comprises of an array of plasmonic nanowires made of a plasmonic metal such as gold or silver placed over a plasmonic film of the same material and separated from it by a dielectric spacer such as silica or alumina. Such a nanostructure exhibits a spectrum that is extremely sensitive to various geometric and electromagnetic parameters such as spacer thickness and spacer refractive index, which makes it favourable for various sensing applications such as chemical and biological sensing, strain sensing, position sensing, vibration sensing, and thickness sensing. We report a comparison of our analytical solution with a numerical rigorous coupled wave analysis of the same structure with the plasmonic medium being treated as local in nature. (paper)