The Nonlinear Limit of Babinet's Principle.

Abstract

Babinet's principle is a powerful tool for predicting the scattering behavior of planar structures where the solution for the complementary structure is already known. This makes it ubiquitous in the design of aperture antennas or metamaterials. Even for plasmonic nanostructures, a qualitative match of the behavior for complementary structures has been reported. Here, we discuss whether Babinet's principle can be used in the nonlinear regime. We choose the example of third harmonic generation and compare the scattering of plasmonic nanorods and complementary nanoslits by far field imaging and simulation. We find significantly different far field images, in agreement between experiment and simulation. We explain these differences by the higher spatial resolution at the third harmonic wavelength and by additional eddy currents in slits that are not present in rods. Consequently, Babinet's principle has a nonlinear limit and cannot be used reliably to design inverted nanoresonators.