Abstract
The grain shape dependence of absorption has been investigated in metal-insulator thin films. We demonstrate that randomness in the size and shape of plasmonic particles can lead to Anderson localization of polarization modes in the deep subwavelength regime. These localized modes can contribute to significant variation in the local field. In the case of plasmonic nanodevices, the effects of the localized modes have been investigated by mapping an electrostatic Hamiltonian onto the Anderson Hamiltonian in the presence of a random vector potential. We show that local behavior of the optical beam can be understood in terms of the weighted local density of the localized modes of the depolarization field. Optical nanodevices that operate on a length scale with high variation in the density of states of localized modes will experience a previously unidentified localized noise. This localization noise contributes uncertainty to the output of plasmonic nanodevices and limits their scalability. In particular, the resulting impact on heat-assisted magnetic recording is discussed.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 205430 |
| Journal | Physical Review B |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue number | 20 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 17 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors acknowledge funding from Western Digital Corporation. A.G. acknowledges a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota. The authors also acknowledge the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota for providing resources that contributed to the research results reported within this paper (see Ref. [37] ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 American Physical Society.