Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 65: Plasmonics and Nanooptics IV: Waveguides and Antennas

O 65.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 11:30–11:45, WIL A317

Limits of optical Yagi-Uda antennas — •René Kullock, Maximilian Ochs, Philipp Grimm, Monika Emmerling, and Bert Hecht — NanoOptics & Biophotonics Group, Experimental Physics 5, University of Würzburg, Germany

Yagi-Uda antennas are a promising building block for light-based on-chip data communication which allows much higher bandwidths than conventional electrical circuitry. On the macroscopic scale they provide a highly directed emission of radio waves and scaled down to the nanometer regime they do the same for light. Already a while ago optically driven Yagi-Uda antenna have been realized [1] and recently we were able to demonstrate the crucial electrical driving using inelastic electron tunneling [2].

Here we show how such antennas are fabricated using advanced focused-ion beam milling and feedback-driven dielectrophoresis. We compare the resulting directional antennas with FB ratios of up to 9 dB to conventional RF Yagi-Uda antennas, discuss their scalability and design limits. Despite increased losses of metals at optical frequencies we show that by utilizing dielectric guiding layers, which are only available in the optical domain, the antennas can actually outperform their RF counterparts.

[1] A. Curto et al., Science 329, 5994 (2010)

[2] R. Kullock et al., Nat. Comm. accepted (2019)