Nanomechanical Control of an Optical Antenna

In this work we present a tunable bowtie optical antenna fabricated via a colloidal nanomask. The structure consists of two gold nanotriangles on a silica substrate. The feedgap can be continuously varied by manipulating an antenna arm with nanometer precision with an atomic force microscope (AFM). At the same time the optical response of the nanoantenna is determined with darkfield scattering spectroscopy.