Mass-producible and efficient optical antennas with CMOS-fabricated nanometer-scale gap.

Optical antennas have been widely used for sensitive photodetection, efficient light emission, high resolution imaging, and biochemical sensing because of their ability to capture and focus light energy beyond the diffraction limit. However, widespread application of optical antennas has been limited due to lack of appropriate methods for uniform and large area fabrication of antennas as well as difficulty in achieving an efficient design with small mode volume (gap spacing < 10nm). Here, we present a novel optical antenna design, arch-dipole antenna, with optimal radiation efficiency and small mode volume, 5 nm gap spacing, fabricated by CMOS-compatible deep-UV spacer lithography. We demonstrate strong surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) signal with an enhancement factor exceeding 10⁸ from the arch-dipole antenna array, which is two orders of magnitude stronger than that from the standard dipole antenna array fabricated by e-beam lithography. Since the antenna gap spacing, the critical dimension of the antenna, can be defined by deep-UV lithography, efficient optical antenna arrays with nanometer-scale gap can be mass-produced using current CMOS technology.