Abstract
The validity of effective medium theory for modeling nanocomposite thin films interacting with a plasmonic nanoantenna has been investigated using an optical circuit model and finite-difference time-domain simulations. We show that in the regime where the size of the optical beam generated by the nanoantenna is comparable to the feature size inside the thin film, the effective medium theory is not valid anymore. We demonstrate that using effective medium theory can cause a dramatic error in the performance analysis of applications such as heat assisted magnetic recording that work at this regime. Therefore, we develop a theoretical framework based on circuit theory at optical frequencies to study and design nanocomposite thin films for these applications.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 092401 |
| Journal | Applied Physics Letters |
| Volume | 108 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 29 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors acknowledge funding from ASTC/IDEMA and Western Digital Corporation. We acknowledge the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota for providing resources that contributed to the research results reported within this paper.
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