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Plasmon propagation pushed to the limit

Excitations called plasmons have the potential to miniaturize photonic devices, but are often short-lived. Microscopy reveals that plasmons in the material graphene can overcome this limitation at low temperatures.
  1. Justin C. W. Song

    1. Justin C. W. Song is in the Division of Physics and Applied Physics, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 637371, Singapore, and the Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR, Singapore.

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Light can be confined and steered at the nanoscale using collective oscillations of electrons known as plasmons. But just as death and taxes are the only certainties in life, energy loss is the only certainty in plasmonics. The tighter the confinement of light, the shorter the lifetime of the plasmons1 — a trade-off that is a major hurdle in the practical use of these oscillations. In a paper in Nature, Ni et al.2 use a technique called scanning near-field optical microscopy to study plasmons in a single layer of carbon atoms known as graphene, at cryogenic temperatures (60 kelvin). The authors show that the plasmons can produce extremely compact light confinement while retaining long lifetimes. They use their results to determine the fundamental limits of plasmon propagation in graphene.

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Nature 557, 501-502 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05190-1

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