Highly-efficient electrically-driven localized surface plasmon source enabled by resonant inelastic electron tunneling

Haoliang Qian, Shilong Li, Su-Wen Hsu, Ching-Fu Chen, Fanglin Tian, Andrea R. Tao and Zhaowei Liu ()
Additional contact information
Haoliang Qian: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr
Shilong Li: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr
Su-Wen Hsu: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr
Ching-Fu Chen: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr
Fanglin Tian: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr
Andrea R. Tao: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr
Zhaowei Liu: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract On-chip plasmonic circuitry offers a promising route to meet the ever-increasing requirement for device density and data bandwidth in information processing. As the key building block, electrically-driven nanoscale plasmonic sources such as nanoLEDs, nanolasers, and nanojunctions have attracted intense interest in recent years. Among them, surface plasmon (SP) sources based on inelastic electron tunneling (IET) have been demonstrated as an appealing candidate owing to the ultrafast quantum-mechanical tunneling response and great tunability. However, the major barrier to the demonstrated IET-based SP sources is their low SP excitation efficiency due to the fact that elastic tunneling of electrons is much more efficient than inelastic tunneling. Here, we remove this barrier by introducing resonant inelastic electron tunneling (RIET)—follow a recent theoretical proposal—at the visible/near-infrared (NIR) frequencies and demonstrate highly-efficient electrically-driven SP sources. In our system, RIET is supported by a TiN/Al2O3 metallic quantum well (MQW) heterostructure, while monocrystalline silver nanorods (AgNRs) were used for the SP generation (localized surface plasmons (LSPs)). In principle, this RIET approach can push the external quantum efficiency (EQE) close to unity, opening up a new era of SP sources for not only high-performance plasmonic circuitry, but also advanced optical sensing applications.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23512-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-23512-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23512-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().