Plasmonic Metasurface Resonators to Enhance Terahertz Magnetic Fields for High-Frequency Electron Paramagnetic Resonance
Nanoscale magnetic systems play a decisive role in areas ranging from biology to spintronics. Although, in principle, THz electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) provides high-resolution access to their properties, lack of sensitivity has precluded realizing this potential. To resolve this issue, the principle of plasmonic enhancement of electromagnetic fields that is used in electric dipole spectroscopies with great success is exploited, and a new type of resonators for the enhancement of THz magnetic fields in a microscopic volume is proposed. A resonator composed of an array of diabolo antennas with a back-reflecting mirror is designed and fabricated. Simulations and THz EPR measurements demonstrate a 30-fold signal increase for thin film samples. This enhancement factor increases to a theoretical value of 7500 for samples confined to the active region of the antennas. These findings open the door to the elucidation of fundamental processes in nanoscale samples, including junctions in spintronic devices or biological membranes. ; This research has been supported by European Union's Horizon 2020 programme FET-OPEN project PETER, GA 767 227. The Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST), and the Carl Zeiss Foundation are also acknowledged. The authors thank Brno University of Technology (FSI-S-20-6485) and the GAČR project 20–28573S. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (national project RTI2018-094830-B-100 and the project MDM-2016-0618 of the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Program) and the Basque Government (grant No. IT1164-19). The authors thank Prof. Sabine Ludwigs and David Neusser for access to the SnowJet cleaner. The authors thank Thomas Keating Ltd. for providing the quasi-optical bench used for the transmission measurements of the PMR. The authors thank Dennis Schäfter for the valuable support provided for the Python scripts and Martin Konečný for useful discussions. Open access funding enabled and organized ...