Near- and far-field investigation of dark and bright higher order resonances in square loop elements at mid-infrared wavelengths.

Three different size gold square loop structures were fabricated as arrays on ZnS over a ground plane and designed to have absorptive fundamental, second order, and third order resonances at a wavelength of 10.6 µm and 60° off-normal. The angular dependent far-field spectral absorptivity was investigated over the mid-infrared for each size loop array. It was found that the second order modes were dark at normal incidence, but became excited at off-normal incidence, which is consistent with previous work for similar geometry structures. Furthermore, near-field measurements and simulations at a wavelength of 10.6 µm and 60° off-normal showed that the second order mode (quadrupolar) of the medium size loop yielded a near-field response similar in magnitude to the fundamental mode (dipolar) of the small size loop, which can be important for sensing related applications where both strong near-field enhancement and more uniform or less localized field is beneficial.