FDTD modeling of photonic crystal-incorporated gold nanoparticles for enhancing the localized electric fieldElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c7tc03668j

Natural photonic crystals (PCs) such as those in butterfly wings have been vastly utilized in signal enhancement applications. In recent years, simulations are mostly related to the color generation phenomenon and reflection properties of butterfly wings, and few of them focus on the localized electric field. Herein, a general exploration of electromagnetic modeling of bioinspired PC-incorporated gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) for enhancing the localized electric field has been illustrated. With the aid of PC, the incorporated system can produce stronger electric fields than AuNP(s). The highest increment of | E | max is 1.96 times from AuNP alone for the AuNP-PC system and 1.86 times for the dimer-PC system. Simulations elucidated that with the aid of photonic crystal, AuNP(s) induced stronger localized electric field than AuNP(s) alone.