Plasmonic particle-on-film nanocavities, supporting gap modes with ultra-small volume, provide a great solution to boost light–matter interactions at the nanoscale. In this work, we report on the photoluminescence (PL) enhancement of monolayer MoS2 using high order modes of an Au nanosphere dimer-on-film nanocavity (DoFN). The high order plasmon modes, consisting of two bonding quadrupoles in the dimer and their images in the Au film, are revealed by combining the polarization-resolved scattering spectra with the numerical simulations. Further integrating the monolayer MoS2 into the DoFN, these high order modes are used to enhance PL intensity through simultaneously boosting the absorption and emission processes, producing a 1350-fold enhancement factor. It opens an avenue to enhance the light–matter interaction with high order plasmon modes and may find applications in future optoelectronics and nanophotonics devices.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the operation of an electrically tunable, broadband coherent perfect absorption (CPA) at microwave frequencies by harnessing the CPA features of a graphene–electrolyte–graphene sandwich structure (GSS). Using both a simplified lumped circuit model and full-wave numerical simulation, it is found that the microwave coherent absorptivity of the GSS can be tuned dynamically from nearly 50% to 100% by changing the Fermi level of the graphene. Strikingly, our simplified lumped circuit model agrees very well with the full-wave numerical model, offering valuable insight into the CPA operation of the device. The angle dependency of coherent absorption in the GSS is further investigated, making suggestions for achieving CPA at wide angles up to 80°. To show the validity and accuracy of our theory and numerical simulations, a GSS prototype is fabricated and measured in a C-band waveguide system. The reasonably good agreement between the experimental and the simulated results confirms that the tunable coherent absorption in GSS can be electrically controlled by changing the Fermi level of the graphene.

We report a method to tune the second harmonic generation (SHG) frequency of a metallic octamer by employing cylindrical vector beams as the excitation. Our method exploits the ability to spatially match the polarization state of excitations with the fundamental target plasmonic modes, enabling flexible control of the SHG resonant frequency. It is found that SHG of the octamer is enhanced over a broad band (400 nm) by changing the excitation from the linearly polarized Gaussian beam to radially and azimuthally polarized beams. More strikingly, when subjected to an azimuthally polarized beam, the SHG intensity of the octamer becomes 30 times stronger than that for the linearly polarized beam even in the presence of Fano resonance.