Slot‐type nanogaps have been widely utilized in transmission geometry because of their advantages of exclusive light funneling and exact quantification of near‐field enhancement at the gap. For further application of the nanogaps in electromagnetic interactions with various target materials, complementary studies on both transmission and reflection properties of the nanogaps are necessary. Here, we observe an anomalous extinction of terahertz waves interacting with rectangular ring‐shaped sub‐30 nm wide gaps. Substrate works as an index matching layer for the nanogaps, leading to a stronger field enhancement and increased nonlinearity at the gap under substrate‐side illumination. This effect is expressed in reflection as a larger dip at the resonance, caused by destructive interference of the diffracted field from the gap with the reflected beam from the metal. The resulting extinction at the resonance is larger than 60% of the incident power, even without any absorbing material in the whole nanogap structure. The extinction even decreases in the presence of an absorbing medium on top of the nanogaps, suggesting that transmission and reflection from nanogaps might not necessarily represent the absorption of the whole structure.

The authors demonstrate a compact and efficient fiber coupling scheme for a surface-emitting photonic crystal laser by using a cleaved fiber tip connected to a wavelength-division-multiplexing 1×2 fiber coupler. Simultaneous optical excitation and laser light collection are achieved for a 1.55μm InGaAsP graphite-lattice Γ-point band edge laser. On comparing with the conventional microphotoluminescence setup based on an objective lens, their direct butt coupling setup is much simpler and yet offers the fiber-coupled output approximately ten times higher. Finite-difference time-domain simulations confirm that the Γ-point band edge laser exhibits the desired vertical emission property and that the fiber coupling efficiency can be as high as 30%.

Electromagnetic absorbers based on ultra-thin metallic film are desirable for many applications such as plasmonics, metamaterials, and long-wavelength detectors. A metallic film will achieve a maximum 50% of electromagnetic wave absorption, frequency independent, at a thickness defined by its conductivity, typically in the sub-Angstrom range for good metals if bulk conductivity is maintained throughout. This makes it extremely difficult to obtain substantial absorption from thin metal films, in contrast to 2D materials such as graphene. Luckily, however, from a practical point of view, metal conductivity is drastically reduced as the film becomes sub-100 nm, to make it a race between the thinnest possible metal thickness experimentally achievable vs the conductivity reduction. Here, we demonstrate a near-50% absorption at a gold film thickness of 6.5 nm, with conductivity much reduced from the bulk value, down to the range of 10⁶ Siemens per meter. Studying the effect of the substrate thickness, we found that the common cover glass, with its thickness much smaller than the wavelength, achieves symmetric absorption of 44%, implying that a pseudo-free-standing limit is achieved. Our work may find applications in infrared sensing as in bolometers and biomedical sensing using microwaves.