The nonresonant electromagnetic transmission of a normal-incident plane wave through a single hole in a perfect conductor metal slab of finite width is studied. The cases of rectangular and circular holes are treated in detail. For holes in the extreme subwavelength regime, in a film of finite thickness, the transmittance is shown to have the Rayleigh dependency upon the wavelength and, in addition, is mainly suppressed due to attenuation of the fundamental waveguide mode. In the limit of an infinitesimally thin screen Bethe’s result is recovered for the circular hole. The numerical computations are fitted, providing expressions for the transmission in a wide region of parameters. We reformulate our results in terms of multipole expansion, interpreting the waveguide modes inside the hole as induced multipole moments. This result provides the link between the modal expansion method and the one based on a multipole expansion.

• Received 4 August 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.78.165429