Employing surface plasmons for ultrafast nanoscale applications

Surface plasmons are light-driven collective oscillations of free electrons at the interface between conducting and dielectric materials. They enable light confinement beyond the diffraction limit, making them ideal for nanoscale applications. The emerging field of ultrafast plasmonics has found applications for surface plasmons in ultrafast optical and electronic processes.

Koya et al. described recent advances in ultrafast plasmonics, approaches for tailoring and controlling plasmon interactions at ultrafast timescales, and directions for future research.

“The field of ultrafast plasmonics has exploded in the past few years thanks to advances in both theoretical and experimental techniques to access fundamental physical information about ultrafast electronic processes on the nanoscale,” said author Nicolò Maccaferri.

By combining plasmonics with ultrafast optics, researchers can drive electrons at faster frequencies than what is possible in conventional electronic devices. This unique synergy can be used in photochemistry and photocatalysis, advanced spectroscopy and nanoscale metrology, and ultrafast optical switching for all-optical computing.

The authors also outlined how high-intensity light pulses can lead to relativistic plasmonic effects with applications in nuclear fusion research.

One of the biggest limitations of ultrafast plasmonics is the modulation speed of nanophotonic devices, which depends on the electron relaxation time. The authors are hopeful that future studies and materials could overcome this limitation and result in even wider applications for the field.

“Enormous advances have been achieved recently, and we believe this field will thrive in upcoming years,” said Maccaferri. “Overall, ultrafast plasmonics can be considered a new direction of research which can lead to completely new states of matter with exciting properties for energy conversion and information processing.”

Source: “Advances in ultrafast plasmonics,” by Alemayehu Nana Koya, Marco Romanelli, Joel Kuttruff, Nils Henriksson, Andrei Stefancu, Gustavo Grinblat, Aitor De Andres, Fritz Schnur, Mirko Vanzan, Margherita Marsili, Mahfujur Rahaman, Alba Viejo Rodríguez, Tlek Tapani, Haifeng Lin, Bereket Dalga Dana, Jingquan Lin, Grégory Barbillon, Remo Proietti Zaccaria, Daniele Brida, Deep Jariwala, László Veisz, Emiliano Cortés, Stefano Corni, Denis Garoli, and Nicolò Maccaferri, Applied Physics Reviews (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0134993 .