Comparison of electron energy-loss and quantitative optical spectroscopy on individual optical gold antennas

Abstract

Using a rather large set of different individual metallic optical antennas, we compare directly measured electron energy-loss spectra with measured quantitative optical extinction and scattering cross-section spectra on the identical antennas. All antenna resonances lie near 1.4 μm wavelength. In contrast to other reports, we find identical resonance positions for electrons and photons to within the experimental errors. We discuss possible artifacts which can lead to seemingly different resonance positions in experiments. Our experimental results agree well with complete numerical calculations of both sorts of spectra.