Fabrication of bowtie aperture antennas for producing sub-20 nm optical spots.

Bowtie aperture antennas are known to generate sub-diffraction limited optical spots in the visible and near-infrared frequencies, which can be applied to many areas. Regular bowtie apertures fabricated by FIB suffer from tapered sidewall and rounded corner, which degrade its optical enhancement and localization. In this work, a new fabrication method is demonstrated to manufacture bowtie aperture antennas which can produce optical spots with lateral size smaller than 20 nm. We also employ numerical simulations to compute the near-field distribution on the surface of the bowtie aperture with topography extracted from the fabrication antennas. The near-field distribution measured by s-NSOM agrees well with the simulation and confirms the improved near-field localization of our bowtie aperture. This new fabrication method can be applied to other types of ridged apertures, which promises wide applications of deep sub-diffraction limited optical spots in many areas.