The index of the glass substrate is taken as 1.5, the periodicity of the structure is 300 nm in both x and y directions. We employ a finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver to perform the electromagnetic simulation with wave propagation direction along the z-axis, normal to the plane containing the gold dimer and polarized along the x-axis (Figure 1a).Figure 1.(a) Unit cell of the metamaterial dimer. The geometric parameters of the gold nanorods of lengths L1 and L2 are: width w = 70 nm, gap g = 50 nm. The gold thickness is 30 nm. The periodicity is 300 nm in both x and y directions. The incident wave is along …3.?Results and DiscussionIn our study of the resonances in the dimer structure, we define a length asymmetry �� = L2 �C L1, with L2 kept constant at 200 nm throughout.

For the symmetric structure with bar lengths L1 = L2 or �� = 0, we calculate the transmission spectra as shown in Figure 1b (solid line). A broad dipolar resonance occurs at about 341.2 THz and corresponds to the bright or super radiant mode which is strongly coupled to the free space. We then consider the situation in which asymmetry is introduced with unequal lengths of the bars L1 and L2 or �� �� 0. For �� = 30 nm, two resonances can be observed from the calculated spectral response, a higher frequency resonance at 362.8 THz and an associated lower frequency resonance at 270.5 THz. The higher frequency resonance of 362.8 THz is a dipole oscillation with similar characteristics like the bright mode resonance of the symmetric dimer structure (�� = 0). The resonant mode at 270.

5 THz, appearing because of the length asymmetry of the dimer, weakly couples to the incident field and is the so-called dark mode [23]. The interference between the bright and the dark modes results in the sharp asymmetric Fano-type profile [6,7,10,14,15,24,25] of the resonance with a characteristic dip and peak as shown in Figure 1b (dashed line).For a better insight into the nature of these resonant modes, we calculate the out-of-plane electric field (Ez) distributions at the bright mode resonance for the symmetric dimer and at both the bright and dark mode resonances for the asymmetric dimer. Ez better than other field components illustrates the charge distribution inside each arm. Figure 2a shows the Ez distribution of the bright mode resonance at 341.

2 THz in the symmetric dimer configuration depicted in Figure 1b (solid line). Here, the dimer behaves as two dipoles with parallel currents which are in-phase and symmetric. The radiation field of dipoles interferes constructively, resulting in the radiant nature AV-951 of the mode. For the asymmetric dimer in Figure 1b (dashed line), the calculated field distributions are shown in Figure 2b,c for the bright and dark mode resonances, respectively. At the higher frequency resonance of 362.8 THz, a bright mode resonance similar to the dipolar mode is observed.