Enhancement of light emission from nanostructured In(2)O(3) via surface plasmons.

We report the construction of In(2)O(3)/Ag/In(2)O(3) sandwich nanostructures and realization of effective coupling with surface plasmon (SP) modes. An enhancement of photoluminescence as large as 278-fold is achieved for the new nanostructures, while only eightfold is obtained from bilayer structures. The advancement of the nanostructures is that both the frequency of incidence photons and the in-plane wavevector of the excited SP modes along each side of the sandwiched nanometer metal layer are identical, thus the momenta mismatch between two SP modes which inevitably occurs in commonly used metal/dielectric bilayer structures is no longer a problem.