skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Nonreciprocal and Topological Plasmonics
Metals, semiconductors, metamaterials, and various two-dimensional materials with plasmonic dispersion exhibit numerous exotic physical effects in the presence of an external bias, for example an external static magnetic field or electric current. These physical phenomena range from Faraday rotation of light propagating in the bulk to strong confinement and directionality of guided modes on the surface and are a consequence of the breaking of Lorentz reciprocity in these systems. The recent introduction of relevant concepts of topological physics, translated from condensed-matter systems to photonics, has not only given a new perspective on some of these topics by relating certain bulk properties of plasmonic media to the surface phenomena, but has also led to the discovery of new regimes of truly unidirectional, backscattering-immune, surface-wave propagation. In this article, we briefly review the concepts of nonreciprocity and topology and describe their manifestation in plasmonic materials. Furthermore, we use these concepts to classify and discuss the different classes of guided surface modes existing on the interfaces of various plasmonic systems.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1741694
PAR ID:
10402653
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Photonics
Volume:
8
Issue:
4
ISSN:
2304-6732
Page Range / eLocation ID:
133
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, Journal of Applied Physics)
    Graphene can support surface plasmons with higher confinement, lower propagation loss, and substantially more tunable response compared to usual metal-based plasmonic structures. Interestingly, plasmons in graphene can strongly couple with nanostructures and gratings placed in its vicinity to form new hybrid systems that can provide a platform to investigate more complicated plasmonic phenomena. In this Perspective, an analysis on the excitation of highly confined graphene plasmons and their strong coupling with metallic or dielectric gratings is performed. We emphasize the flexibility in the efficient control of light–matter interaction by these new hybrid systems, benefiting from the interplay between graphene plasmons and other external resonant modes. The hybrid graphene-plasmon grating systems offer unique tunable plasmonic resonances with enhanced field distributions. They exhibit a novel route to realize practical emerging applications, including nonreciprocal devices, plasmonic switches, perfect absorbers, nonlinear structures, photodetectors, and optical sensors. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; (, Nanophotonics)
    Abstract The cooperative phenomena stemming from the radiation field-mediated coupling between individual quantum emitters are presently attracting broad interest for applications related to on-chip photonic quantum memories and long-range entanglement. Common to these applications is the generation of electro-magnetic modes over macroscopic distances. Much research, however, is still needed before such systems can be deployed in the form of practical devices, starting with the investigation of alternate physical platforms. Quantum emitters in two-dimensional (2D) systems provide an intriguing route because these materials can be adapted to arbitrarily shaped substrates to form hybrid systems wherein emitters are near-field-coupled to suitable optical modes. Here, we report a scalable coupling method allowing color center ensembles in a van der Waals material (hexagonal boron nitride) to couple to a delocalized high-quality plasmonic surface lattice resonance. This type of architecture is promising for photonic applications, especially given the ability of the hexagonal boron nitride emitters to operate as single-photon sources at room temperature. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, ACS Photonics)
    Plasmonic response in metals, defined as the ability to support subwavelength confinement of surface plasmon modes, is typically limited to a narrow frequency range below the metals’ plasma frequency. This places severe limitations on the operational wavelengths of plasmonic materials and devices. However, when the volume of a metal film is massively decreased, highly confined quasi-two-dimensional surface plasmon modes can be supported out to wavelengths well beyond the plasma wavelength. While this has, thus far, been achieved using ultrathin (nm-scale) metals, such films are quite difficult to realize and suffer from even higher losses than bulk plasmonic films. To extend the plasmonic response to the infrared, here we introduce the concept of metaplasmonics, representing a novel plasmonic modality with a host of appealing properties. By fabricating and characterizing a series of metaplasmonic nanoribbons, we demonstrate large confinement, high-quality factors, and large near-field enhancements across a broad wavelength range, extending well beyond the limited bandwidth of traditional plasmonic materials. We demonstrate 35× plasmon wavelength reduction, and numerical simulations suggest that further wavelength reduction, up to a factor of 150, is achievable using our approach. The demonstration of the metaplasmonics paradigm offers a promising path to fill the near- and mid-infrared technological gap for high-quality plasmonic materials and provides a new material system to study the effects of extreme plasmonic confinement for applications in nonlinear and quantum plasmonics. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, Nanophotonics)
    Plasmonic modes confined to metallic nanostructures at the atomic and molecular scale push the boundaries of light–matter interactions. Within these extreme plasmonic structures of ultrathin nanogaps, coupled nanoparticles, and tunnelling junctions, new physical phenomena arise when plasmon resonances couple to electronic, exitonic, or vibrational excitations, as well as the efficient generation of non-radiative hot carriers. This review surveys the latest experimental and theoretical advances in the regime of extreme nano-plasmonics, with an emphasis on plasmon-induced hot carriers, strong coupling effects, and electrically driven processes at the molecular scale. We will also highlight related nanophotonic and optoelectronic applications including plasmon-enhanced molecular light sources, photocatalysis, photodetection, and strong coupling with low dimensional materials. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al (, Journal of Physics: Materials)
    Soft materials are usually defined as materials made of mesoscopic entities, often self-organised, sensitive to thermal fluctuations and to weak perturbations. Archetypal examples are colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, foams. The importance of soft materials in everyday commodity products, as well as in technological applications, is enormous, and controlling or improving their properties is the focus of many efforts. From a fundamental perspective, the possibility of manipulating soft material properties, by tuning interactions between constituents and by applying external perturbations, gives rise to an almost unlimited variety in physical properties. Together with the relative ease to observe and characterise them, this renders soft matter systems powerful model systems to investigate statistical physics phenomena, many of them relevant as well to hard condensed matter systems. Understanding the emerging properties from mesoscale constituents still poses enormous challenges, which have stimulated a wealth of new experimental approaches, including the synthesis of new systems with, e.g. tailored self-assembling properties, or novel experimental techniques in imaging, scattering or rheology. Theoretical and numerical methods, and coarse-grained models, have become central to predict physical properties of soft materials, while computational approaches that also use machine learning tools are playing a progressively major role in many investigations. This Roadmap intends to give a broad overview of recent and possible future activities in the field of soft materials, with experts covering various developments and challenges in material synthesis and characterisation, instrumental, simulation and theoretical methods as well as general concepts. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email