High-Q plasmonic bottle microresonator

In this paper, we demonstrate a hybrid plasmonic bottle microresonator (PBMR) which supports whispering gallery modes (WGMs) along with surface plasmon waves (SPWs) for high performance optical sensor applications. The BMR was fabricated through "soften-and-compress" technique with a thin gold layer deposited on top of the resonator. A polarization-resolved measurement was set-up in order to fully characterize the fabricated PBMR. Initially, the uncoated BMR with waist diameter of 181 pm, stem diameter of 125 mu m and length of 400 mu m was fabricated and then gold film was deposited on the surface. Due to surface curvature, the gold film covering half of the BMR had a characteristic meniscus shape and maximum thickness of 30 nm. The meniscus provides appropriately tapered edges which facilitate the adiabatic transformation of BMR WGMs to SPWs and vice versa. This results in low transition losses, which combined with partially-metal-coated resonator, can result in high hybrid-PBMR Q's. The transmission spectra of the hybrid PBMR are dramatically different to the original uncoated BMR. Under TE(TM) excitation, the PBMR showed composite resonances with Q of similar to 2100(850) and almost identical similar to 3 nm FSR. We have accurately fitted the observed transmission resonances with Lorentzian-shaped curves and showed that the TE and TM excitations are actually composite resonances comprise of two and three partially overlapping resonances with Q's in excess of 2900 and 2500, respectively. To the best of our knowledge these are the highest Qs observed in plasmonic microcavities.