Effect of metal film thickness on Tamm plasmon-coupled emission.

ABSTRACT

Tamm plasmons (TPs) are the result of trapping optical energy at the interface between a metal film and a one-dimensional photonic crystal. In contrast to surface plasmons, TPs display unique properties such as the ability to undergo direct optical excitation without the aid of prisms or gratings, being populated using both S- and P-polarized light, and importantly, they can be created with incident light normal to the surface. This latter property has recently been used to obtain Tamm plasmon-coupled emission (TPCE), which beams along a path directly perpendicular to the surface. In this paper the effects of metal film thickness on the TPCE are investigated using back focal plane (BFP) imaging and spectral resolutions. The observed experimental results are in agreement with the numerical simulations. The present work provides the basic understanding needed to design structures for TPCE, which in turn has potential applications in the fabrication of active materials for light emitting devices, fluorescence-based sensing, using microarrays, and imaging.