Stable, high-performance sodium-based plasmonic devices in the near infrared

Yang Wang, Jianyu Yu, Yi-Fei Mao, Ji Chen, Suo Wang, Hua-Zhou Chen, Yi Zhang, Si-Yi Wang, Xinjie Chen, Tao Li, Lin Zhou (), Ren-Min Ma (), Shining Zhu (), Wenshan Cai and Jia Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Yang Wang: Nanjing University
Jianyu Yu: Nanjing University
Yi-Fei Mao: Peking University
Ji Chen: Nanjing University
Suo Wang: Peking University
Hua-Zhou Chen: Peking University
Yi Zhang: Zhejiang Gongshang University
Si-Yi Wang: Peking University
Xinjie Chen: Nanjing University
Tao Li: Nanjing University
Lin Zhou: Nanjing University
Ren-Min Ma: Peking University
Shining Zhu: Nanjing University
Wenshan Cai: Georgia Institute of Technology
Jia Zhu: Nanjing University

Nature, 2020, vol. 581, issue 7809, 401-405

Abstract: Abstract Plasmonics enables the manipulation of light beyond the optical diffraction limit1–4 and may therefore confer advantages in applications such as photonic devices5–7, optical cloaking8,9, biochemical sensing10,11 and super-resolution imaging12,13. However, the essential field-confinement capability of plasmonic devices is always accompanied by a parasitic Ohmic loss, which severely reduces their performance. Therefore, plasmonic materials (those with collective oscillations of electrons) with a lower loss than noble metals have long been sought14–16. Here we present stable sodium-based plasmonic devices with state-of-the-art performance at near-infrared wavelengths. We fabricated high-quality sodium films with electron relaxation times as long as 0.42 picoseconds using a thermo-assisted spin-coating process. A direct-waveguide experiment shows that the propagation length of surface plasmon polaritons supported at the sodium–quartz interface can reach 200 micrometres at near-infrared wavelengths. We further demonstrate a room-temperature sodium-based plasmonic nanolaser with a lasing threshold of 140 kilowatts per square centimetre, lower than values previously reported for plasmonic nanolasers at near-infrared wavelengths. These sodium-based plasmonic devices show stable performance under ambient conditions over a period of several months after packaging with epoxy. These results indicate that the performance of plasmonic devices can be greatly improved beyond that of devices using noble metals, with implications for applications in plasmonics, nanophotonics and metamaterials.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2306-9

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