Plasmonic enhancement of metamaterial nanograting with high color purity and wide color gamut characteristics

Abstract We propose two designs of plasmonic enhancement using metamaterial nanograting (MNG) for color filters. MNGs are composed of metal–insulator–metal and metal-air–metal layers denoted as MNG-1 and MNG-2, respectively. MNGs exhibit polarization-dependent, high color purity, and wide color gamut characteristics. According to the surface plasmon (SP) theory, MNG-1 shows all colors filtering in the whole visible spectrum by changing the thickness of metal and insulator layers. While MNG-2 exhibits tunable color filtering characteristic by dynamically changing the distance between two metal layers. MNG-2 also exhibits tunable dual-resonance when exposed on the ambient with different refraction index. These high color purity and wide color gamut characteristics open the avenue of ultrahigh resolution imaging, visual anti-counterfeiting, and environmental sensing applications.