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Nano-optics

Launching plasmons with molecules

Nature Photonics volume 10, pages 208–209 (2016)Cite this article

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An optoelectronic prototype based on a self-assembled molecular junction to controllably excite propagating surface plasmons has been developed.

Circuits in which the information is carried by surface plasmons are perceived as a high-speed alternative to conventional electronic circuits. The bosonic nature of the surface plasmons offers promising new possibilities such as access to extremely high working frequencies (∼petahertz) allowing for speeding up devices by orders of magnitude. Whereas purely plasmonic circuits appear as a long-term goal, electronic devices integrating plasmonic subunits, also called hybrid electronic–plasmonic circuits, make for a more immediate challenge. An issue here is to find controllable transducers between electrical and plasmonic signals.

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Figure 1: Schematic of a self-assembled monolayer junction operating as an integrated electrically driven source for surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guillaume Schull is at the Institut de Physique et Chimie des Matériaux de Strasbourg, UMR 7504, CNRS—Université de Strasbourg, 67034 Strasbourg, France,

    Guillaume Schull

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  1. Guillaume Schull
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Correspondence to Guillaume Schull.

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Schull, G. Launching plasmons with molecules. Nature Photon 10, 208–209 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.42

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