Babinet´s principle on plasmonic metasurfaces

Babinet’s principle of complementarity states that diffraction pattern from an opaque body is identical to that from a hole of the same size and shape. As plasmonic share many parallels with optics it is intriguing to explore the Babinet’s principle also in this field.

Employing large portfolio of instruments offered by Core Facility spanning from structure fabrication to optical and EELS characterization, team of V. Křápek formulated the requirements for the validity of Babinent’s principle in plasmonics.

Whereas the qualitative validity of Babinet’s principle has been confirmed, quantitative differences have been found related to the energy and quality factor of the resonances and the magnitude of related near fields.

M. Horák, V. Křápek, M. Hrtoň, A. Konečná, F. Ligmajer, M. Stöger-Pollach, T. Šamořil, A. Paták, Z. Édes, O. Metelka, J. Babocký, T. Šikola: Limits of Babinet’s principle for solid and hollow plasmonic antennas. Sci. Rep. 9 (2019), 4004.