Field enhancement by surface plasmon polariton in self-assembling nanopatterned media

We present the fabrication of nanodot arrays on metal films by self-assembly of diblock copolymer. The nanodots are uniform and aligned regularly with hexagonal close-packed structure on both gold film and glass. Gold is specifically a good candidate as the metal film excites surface plasmon polariton in the near-field optical media. Surface plasmon polariton is excited with the Kretschmann configuration at the gold-nanodot interface. We found that the intensity at the interface was enhanced 53.8 times to that of the incident light. It is expected to improve the carrier-to-noise ratio of the readout signal in the case of nanopatterned near-field optical data storage under collection mode.