Electrical nanosources of surface plasmons will be an integral part of any future plasmonic circuits. Three different types of such nanosources (based on inelastic electron tunneling, high energy electron bombardment, and the electrical injection of a semiconductor device) are briefly described here. An example of a fundamental experiment using an electrical nanosource consisting of the tunnel junction formed between a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and a metallic sample is given. In this experiment, the temporal coherence of the broadband STM-plasmon source is probed using a variant of Young's double slit experiment, and the coherence time of the broadband source is estimated to be about 5-10 fs.

Date Published: 14 March 2015
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9361, Ultrafast Phenomena and Nanophotonics XIX, 93610Q (14 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2076891

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9361:
Ultrafast Phenomena and Nanophotonics XIX
Markus Betz; Abdulhakem Y. Elezzabi; Kong-Thon Tsen, Editor(s)