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Plasmons dragged by drifting electrons

Plasmons are combinations of light and collective electron oscillations. The demonstration that plasmons can be dragged by drifting electrons in the 2D material graphene could lead to advances in optical physics.
  1. Hugen Yan

    1. Hugen Yan is at the State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics, the Key Laboratory of Micro- and Nano-Photonic Structures (Ministry of Education) and the Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.

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A wave passing through a moving medium can be dragged by that medium. Depending on the relative velocity directions of the wave and medium, this effect can either increase or decrease the wave’s speed. For a light wave, which typically travels at an enormous speed, the drag effect of a moving medium is negligibly small. Only sensitive optical-interference techniques can detect such a speed change — as shown by a celebrated experiment performed by the French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau in 1851, in which light passes through moving water1. Writing in Nature, Dong et al.2 and Zhao et al.3 demonstrate an analogous effect in which plasmons (combinations of light and collective electron oscillations) are dragged by drifting electrons in solids. The groups show that this effect is much more pronounced than that for light travelling through a moving medium.

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Nature 594, 498-499 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01599-3

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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