Enhancement and tailoring of hybrid self-assembled photonic-plasmonic crystals emission

In this work we present a complete experimental and theoretical study on the emission characteristics of this structures when different filling fraction of spheres in the lattice are considered. By continuously reducing the diameter of polystyrene spheres deposited on gold substrates while keeping the lattice constant unchanged, we show that the modal position can be strongly modify. We demonstrate that such modification can be applied to emissive structures leading to an easy method to adjust emission peaks at the required wavelength. As a proof of principle, this method has been applied to red-dye doped spheres over gold substrate and large tunability of the emission has been found. We have paid special attention to the evolution of the emission enhancement for the three best defined modes of the system. That evolution is explained in terms of the field distribution of each mode depending on whether they are plasmon-like or waveguided-like.