We study optical interactions between nano-scaled cavities consist of metal-insulator-metal structures (MIM nano-cavity) with femtosecond surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wavepackets in terms of numerical simulations and time-resolved microscopy methods. Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations show that when the eigen-frequency of the nanocavity falls within the spectral width of the SPP wave, the incident wavepacket causes resonant excitations of the cavity. The resonance effect of the SPP-cavity interaction is reflected as strong modulations in the spectra of transmitted and reflected wavepackets. Because the MIM nanocavity separates the wavepacket into resonance frequencies as the transmission and others as the reflection, both the envelope and the spectral shapes of the transmitted/reflected components are largely deformed. Particularly, when the spectrum width of the incident wave was equivalent to or narrower than the resonance linewidth of the cavity, the whole intensity of the transmitted wavepacket varied largely. The time-resolved imaging by using a 10 fs laser pulse, of which spectral width is comparable to the linewidth of cavity resonance, shows reasonable agreement with the simulation. In the case the length of the MIM nano-cavity is chosen so that the eigen-modes do not have spectral overlap with that of the 10 fs laser, the intensity of the transmitted wavepackets showed a considerable attenuation. These features can be interpreted in terms of the functionality of the MIM cavity as a Fabry–Pérot etalon.
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