Extraordinary optical transmission

Extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) is the phenomenon of greatly enhanced transmission of light through a subwavelength aperture in an otherwise opaque metallic film which has been patterned with a regularly repeating periodic structure. Generally when light of a certain wavelength falls on a subwavelength aperture, it is diffracted isotropically in all directions evenly, with minimal far-field transmission. This is the understanding from classical aperture theory as described by Bethe. In EOT however, the regularly repeating structure enables much higher transmission efficiency to occur, up to several orders of magnitude greater than that predicted by classical aperture theory. It was first described in 1998.