Tunable enhanced optical transmission in a metal–dielectric multilayer structured with annular aperture arrays

Recently, it has been demonstrated that nano-metric subwavelength annular aperture arrays (AAAs) in silver films can exhibit greatly enhanced transmission in visible and near infrared (NIR) range resulted from a waveguide mode described as TE11-like plasmonic mode. Here we propose a structure of metal–dielectric cascading multilayer perforated with AAAs, in which the plasmonic guided modes located in each cavity and the horizontal Bloch SPP modes (HSPs) excited on the in-plane metal–dielectric interfaces compete in the optical transmission and the coupling of HSPs between the upper and lower interfaces of one single layer and even among interfaces of different layers also play an important role to the transmitted energy redistribution, thus to result in tunable enhanced transmission in the NIR range. These properties can provide insight into the design of tunable metal–dielectric optical devices and are of significant potential applicable value to the nanotechnologies.