Optical Properties of Nanoporous Gold Sponges Using Model Structures Obtained from Three-dimensional Phase-field Simulation

Nanoporous sponge structures show fascinating optical properties related to a strong spatial localization of field modes and a resulting strong field enhancement. In this work, a novel efficient method for the generation of three-dimensional nanoporous sponge structures using time-resolved phase-field simulations is presented. The algorithm for creating the geometries and the underlying equations are discussed. Different sponge geometries are generated and compared with sponges that have been experimentally measured using FIB tomography. Meaningful parameters are defined for the comparison of the geometric properties of the random sponge structures. In addition, the optical properties of the simulated sponges are compared with the experimentally measured sponges. It is shown that a description using effective media does not provide a good agreement to the actual spectra. This shows that the optical properties are largely determined by the local structures. In contrast, the numerically obtained spectra of the phase-field sponge models accounting for the real-space structure show excellent agreement with the spectra of the experimentally measured sponges.