Morphology Engineering for High-Q Plasmonic Surface Lattice Resonances with Large Field Enhancement

Plasmonic surface lattice resonances (SLRs) have endowed plasmonic systems with unprecedently high quality (Q) factors, giving rise to great advantages for light-matter interactions and boosting the developments of nanolaser, photodetector, biosensor and so on. However, it still lacks exploration to develop a strategy for achieving large electric field enhancements (FEs) while maintaining high Q factors of SLRs. Here, we investigate and verify such a strategy by engineering morphologies of plasmonic lattice, in which the influences of geometrical shapes, cross-section areas and structural compositions of particles are investigated. Firstly, we found that the Q factor of a plasmonic SLR is inversely proportional to the square of the cross-section area of the cell particles in the studied cases. Secondly, larger FEs of SLRs appear when the separated cell particles support stronger FEs. By combining these effects of particle morphology, we achieve a plasmonic SLR with Q factor and FE up to 2100 and 592 times, respectively. Additionally, supported by the derived connections between the Q factors and FEs of SLRs and the properties of cell particles, the property optimizations of SLRs can be done by optimizing the separated particles, which are distinctly time-saving in simulations. These results provide a guideline for the design of high-performance optical nanocavities, and can benefit a variety of fields including biosensing, nonlinear optics and quantum information processing.