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Nanoparticle waveguides

Watching energy transfer

Nature Materials volume 2, pages 210–211 (2003)Cite this article

There may be plenty of room at the bottom, but the size of conventional optical elements is restricted by the diffraction limit of light. Plasmon waveguides made from metal nanoparticle chains may allow a drastic reduction in the size of photonic devices.

Modern technology relies heavily on photonic and optoelectronic devices for signal transmission and routing, chemical analysis and sensor applications. As is the case for electronics, increasing the speed and sensitivity of photonic devices relies on further miniaturization of photonic elements. But there is a fundamental limit to the minimum size of conventional optical elements such as dielectric waveguides. This limit is set by diffraction to be about half the wavelength of light. For visible light, this translates into a minimum element size of a few hundred nanometres — too large for fabricating nano- and molecular-scale photonic devices. Near-field optics, which exploits non-propagating (evanescent) fields rather than propagating light waves, provides a way of circumventing the diffraction (and therefore size) limit. As they report on page 229 of this issue, Stefan Maier and colleagues1 have now directly observed energy transfer along a nanoparticle plasmon 'waveguide'. These metal nanoparticle chains may become a central component of nanoscale photonic devices.

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Figure 1: Excitation and detection of energy transport in metal nanoparticle chains by near-field optical microscopy1.

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  1. Institute for Experimental Physics and Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Nanoscale Research, Karl-Franzens-University Graz, Graz, A-8010, Austria

    Joachim R. Krenn

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  1. Joachim R. Krenn
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Krenn, J. Watching energy transfer. Nature Mater 2, 210–211 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat865

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat865

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