Ultrasmall and tunable TeraHertz surface plasmon cavities at the ultimate plasmonic limit

Ian Aupiais (), Romain Grasset, Tingwen Guo, Dmitri Daineka, Javier Briatico, Sarah Houver, Luca Perfetti, Jean-Paul Hugonin, Jean-Jacques Greffet and Yannis Laplace ()
Additional contact information
Ian Aupiais: CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Romain Grasset: CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Tingwen Guo: CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Dmitri Daineka: CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Javier Briatico: CNRS, Thales, Université Paris Saclay
Sarah Houver: Université Paris Cité, CNRS
Luca Perfetti: CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Jean-Paul Hugonin: Université Paris-Saclay, Institut d’Optique Graduate School, CNRS, Laboratoire Charles Fabry
Jean-Jacques Greffet: Université Paris-Saclay, Institut d’Optique Graduate School, CNRS, Laboratoire Charles Fabry
Yannis Laplace: CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract The ability to confine THz photons inside deep-subwavelength cavities promises a transformative impact for THz light engineering with metamaterials and for realizing ultrastrong light-matter coupling at the single emitter level. To that end, the most successful approach taken so far has relied on cavity architectures based on metals, for their ability to constrain the spread of electromagnetic fields and tailor geometrically their resonant behavior. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a comparatively high level of confinement by exploiting a plasmonic mechanism based on localized THz surface plasmon modes in bulk semiconductors. We achieve plasmonic confinement at around 1 THz into record breaking small footprint THz cavities exhibiting mode volumes as low as $${V}_{cav}/{\lambda }_{0}^{3} \sim 1{0}^{-7}-1{0}^{-8}$$ V c a v / λ 0 3 ~ 1 0 − 7 − 1 0 − 8 , excellent coupling efficiencies and a large frequency tunability with temperature. Notably, we find that plasmonic-based THz cavities can operate until the emergence of electromagnetic nonlocality and Landau damping, which together constitute a fundamental limit to plasmonic confinement. This work discloses nonlocal plasmonic phenomena at unprecedentedly low frequencies and large spatial scales and opens the door to novel types of ultrastrong light-matter interaction experiments thanks to the plasmonic tunability.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43394-w 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:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-43394-w

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43394-w

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 ().