Inelastic Electron Tunneling-Based Excitation of Surface Plasmons

Abstract

Abstract: Surface plasmons are highly confined electromagnetic modes coherently coupled to collective oscillations of free carriers at metal (or doped semiconductor) interfaces, which can greatly enhance light-matter interaction at the nanoscale and have found valuable applications in areas such as waveguiding, biochemical sensing, ultrafast modulation, detection and nonlinear optics. They are usually excited by diffraction-limited optical approaches with the use of bulky optical components (prisms, gratings,etc), which greatly limit the miniaturization of plasmonic devices and their chip-scale high-density integration. By integrating a plasmonic nanostructure with a quantum tunnel junction, low-energy inelastically tunneled electrons can directly excite plasmonic modes in the nanostructure with advantages such as ultra-small footprint and ultra-fast speed. In this paper, recent research progress in the inelastic tunneling-based electric excitation of localized and propagating surface plasmons is overviewed.

Key words: surface plasmon, tunnel junction, inelastic electron tunneling, optical antenna, local density of optical state, light emission, waveguiding

CLC Number:

O482

ZHENG Junsheng, LIU Lufang, PAN Chenxinyu, GUO Xin, TONG Limin, WANG Pan. Inelastic Electron Tunneling-Based Excitation of Surface Plasmons[J]. Journal of Synthetic Crystals, 2021, 50(7): 1275-1286.

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