Single-Step Fabrication of High-Performance Extraordinary Transmission Plasmonic Metasurfaces Employing Ultrafast Lasers

Plasmonic metasurfaces based on the extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) effect can be designed to efficiently transmit specific spectral bands from the visible to the far-infrared regimes, offering numerous applications in important technological fields such as compact multispectral imaging, biological and chemical sensing, or color displays. However, due to their subwavelength nature, EOT metasurfaces are nowadays fabricated with nano- and micro-lithographic techniques, requiring many processing steps and carrying out in expensive cleanroom environments. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel, single-step process for the rapid fabrication of high-performance mid- and long-wave infrared EOT metasurfaces employing ultrafast direct laser writing. Microhole arrays composing extraordinary transmission metasurfaces were fabricated over an area of 4 mm2 in timescales of units of minutes, employing single pulse ablation of 40 nm thick Au films on dielectric substrates mounted on a high-precision motorized stage. We show how by carefully characterizing the influence of only three key experimental parameters on the processed micro-morphologies (namely, laser pulse energy, scan velocity, and beam shaping slit), we can have on-demand control of the optical characteristics of the extraordinary transmission effect in terms of transmission wavelength, quality factor, and polarization sensitivity of the resonances. To illustrate this concept, a set of EOT metasurfaces having different performances and operating in different spectral regimes has been successfully designed, fabricated, and tested. Comparison between transmittance measurements and numerical simulations has revealed that all the fabricated devices behave as expected, thus demonstrating the high performance, flexibility, and reliability of the proposed fabrication method. We believe that our findings provide the pillars for mass production of EOT metasurfaces with on-demand optical properties and create new research trends toward single-step laser fabrication of metasurfaces with alternative geometries and/or functionalities.