Abstract
We demonstrate a concept of optical data storage through plasmonic resonances of metallic nano-structures. Metallic nano-structures exhibit strong variations in their reflectance and/or transmittance spectra due to surface plasmon polariton resonances. We study the variations of spectra through 50×50 arrays of repeated unit cells covering a total area of ~50×50 μm 2 . Each cell contains 10 different nano-features, such as an ellipse, a ring, a circle, a triangle, a square, etc. The size of each unit-cell is 500×500 nm2, and the periodicity is 1.0 μm. The variations of spectra are obvious enough to be distinguished and then retrieved. © 2011 Optical Society of America.