Tapered metallic grooves have been shown to support plasmons - electromagnetically coupled oscillations of free electrons at metal-dielectric interfaces - across a variety of configurations and ...V-like profiles. Such plasmons may be divided into two categories: gap-surface plasmons (GSPs) that are confined laterally between the tapered groove sidewalls and propagate either along the groove axis or normal to the planar surface, and channeled plasmon polaritons (CPPs) that occupy the tapered groove profile and propagate exclusively along the groove axis. Both GSPs and CPPs exhibit an assortment of unique properties that are highly suited to a broad range of cutting-edge nanoplasmonic technologies, including ultracompact photonic circuits, quantum-optics components, enhanced lab-on-a-chip devices, efficient light-absorbing surfaces and advanced optical filters, while additionally affording a niche platform to explore the fundamental science of plasmon excitations and their interactions. In this Review, we provide a research status update of plasmons in tapered grooves, starting with a presentation of the theory and important features of GSPs and CPPs, and follow with an overview of the broad range of applications they enable or improve. We cover the techniques that can fabricate tapered groove structures, in particular highlighting wafer-scale production methods, and outline the various photon- and electron-based approaches that can be used to launch and study GSPs and CPPs. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that remain for further developing plasmonic tapered-groove devices, and consider the future directions offered by this select yet potentially far-reaching topic area.
We provide a review of plasmons in tapered grooves, covering the fundamental physics, applications, synthesis, and operation methods.
Metallic nanostructures exhibit a multitude of optical resonances associated with localized surface plasmon excitations. Recent observations of plasmonic phenomena at the sub-nanometre to atomic ...scale have stimulated the development of various sophisticated theoretical approaches for their description. Here instead we present a comparatively simple semiclassical generalized non-local optical response theory that unifies quantum pressure convection effects and induced charge diffusion kinetics, with a concomitant complex-valued generalized non-local optical response parameter. Our theory explains surprisingly well both the frequency shifts and size-dependent damping in individual metallic nanoparticles as well as the observed broadening of the crossover regime from bonding-dipole plasmons to charge-transfer plasmons in metal nanoparticle dimers, thus unravelling a classical broadening mechanism that even dominates the widely anticipated short circuiting by quantum tunnelling. We anticipate that our theory can be successfully applied in plasmonics to a wide class of conducting media, including doped semiconductors and low-dimensional materials such as graphene.
Compared to artificially structured hyperbolic metamaterials, whose performance is limited by the finite size of the metallic components, the sparse number of naturally hyperbolic materials recently ...discovered are promising candidates for the next generation of hyperbolic materials. Using first-principles calculations, we extend the number of known naturally hyperbolic materials to the broad class of layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). The diverse electronic properties of the transition metal dichalcogenides result in a large variation of the hyperbolic frequency regimes ranging from the near-infrared to the ultraviolet. Combined with the emerging field of van der Waals heterostructuring, we demonstrate how the hyperbolic properties can be further controlled by stacking different two-dimensional crystals opening new perspectives for atomic-scale design of photonic metamaterials. As an application, we identify candidates for Purcell factor control of emission from diamond nitrogen-vacancy centers.Natural hyperbolic materials retain the peculiar optical properties of traditional metamaterials whilst not requiring artificial structuring. Here, the authors perform a theoretical screening of a large class of natural materials with hyperbolic dispersion among the family of layered transition metal dichalcogenides.
Plasmon and phonon polaritons of two-dimensional (2D) and van-der-Waals materials have recently gained substantial interest. Unfortunately, they are notoriously hard to observe in linear response ...because of their strong confinement, low frequency and longitudinal mode symmetry. Here, we propose an approach of harnessing nonlinear resonant scattering that we call stimulated plasmon polariton scattering (SPPS) in analogy to the opto-acoustic stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). We show that SPPS allows to excite, amplify and detect 2D plasmon and phonon polaritons all across the THz-range while requiring only optical components in the near-IR or visible range. We present a coupled-mode theory framework for SPPS and based on this find that SPPS power gains exceed the very top gains observed in on-chip SBS by at least an order of magnitude. This opens exciting possibilities to fundamental studies of 2D materials and will help closing the THz gap in spectroscopy and information technology.
Ischemic preconditioning reduces local tissue injury caused by subsequent ischemia-reperfusion (IR), but may also have a salutary effect on IR injury of tissues remote from those undergoing ...preconditioning. We tested the hypothesis that limb ischemia induces remote preconditioning, reduces endothelial IR injury in humans, and reduces experimental myocardial infarct size.
Endothelial IR injury of the human forearm was induced by 20 minutes of upper limb ischemia (inflation of a blood pressure cuff to 200 mm Hg) followed by reperfusion. Remote preconditioning was induced by three 5-minute cycles of ischemia of the contralateral limb. Venous occlusion plethysmography was used to assess forearm blood flow in response to acetylcholine at baseline and 15 minutes after reperfusion. Experimental myocardial infarction was achieved by 40 minutes of balloon occlusion of the left anterior descending artery in 15-kg pigs. Remote preconditioning was induced by four 5-minute cycles of lower limb ischemia. Triphenyltetrazolium staining was used to assess the extent of myocardial infarction. In the human study, the response to acetylcholine was significantly attenuated in the control group after 15 minutes' reperfusion, but remote preconditioning prevented this reduction. Limb ischemia caused a significant reduction in the extent of myocardial infarction relative to the area at risk compared with control (26+/-9% versus 53+/-8%, P<0.05).
Remote ischemic preconditioning prevents IR-induced endothelial dysfunction in humans and reduces the extent of myocardial infarction in experimental animals. Transient limb ischemia is a simple preconditioning stimulus with important potential clinical applications.
Surface plasmon polaritons enable light concentration within subwavelength regions, opening thereby new avenues for miniaturizing the device and strengthening light-matter interactions. Here we ...realize efficient electro-optic modulation in low-loss plasmonic waveguides with the aid of graphene, and the devices are fully integrated in the silicon-on-insulator platform. By advantageously exploiting low-loss plasmonic slot-waveguide modes, which weakly leak into a substrate while featuring strong fields within the two-layer-graphene covered slots in metals, we successfully achieve a tunability of 0.13 dB μm
for our fabricated graphene-plasmonic waveguide devices with extremely low insertion loss, which outperforms previously reported graphene-plasmonic devices. Our results highlight the potential of graphene plasmonic leaky-mode hybrid waveguides to realize active ultra-compact devices for optoelectronic applications.
We address the fundamental question of which size a metallic nano-particle needs to have before its surface chemical properties can be considered to be those of a solid, rather than those of a large ...molecule. Calculations of adsorption energies for carbon monoxide and oxygen on a series of gold nanoparticles ranging from 13 to 1,415 atoms, or 0.8–3.7 nm, have been made possible by exploiting massively parallel computing on up to 32,768 cores on the Blue Gene/P computer at Argonne National Laboratory. We show that bulk surface properties are obtained for clusters larger than ca. 560 atoms (2.7 nm). Below that critical size, finite-size effects can be observed, and we show those to be related to variations in the local atomic structure augmented by quantum size effects for the smallest clusters.
Graphical Abstract
The recent generalised nonlocal optical response (GNOR) theory for plasmonics is analysed, and its main input parameter, namely the complex hydrodynamic convection-diffusion constant, is quantified ...in terms of enhanced Landau damping due to diffusive surface scattering of electrons at the surface of the metal. GNOR has been successful in describing plasmon damping effects, in addition to the frequency shifts originating from induced-charge screening, through a phenomenological electron diffusion term implemented into the traditional hydrodynamic Drude model of nonlocal plasmonics. Nevertheless, its microscopic derivation and justification is still missing. Here we discuss how the inclusion of a diffusion-like term in standard hydrodynamics can serve as an efficient vehicle to describe Landau damping without resorting to computationally demanding quantum-mechanical calculations, and establish a direct link between this term and the Feibelman d parameter for the centroid of charge. Our approach provides a recipe to connect the phenomenological fundamental GNOR parameter to a frequency-dependent microscopic surface-response function. We therefore tackle one of the principal limitations of the model, and further elucidate its range of validity and limitations, thus facilitating its proper application in the framework of nonclassical plasmonics.
Electronic structure calculations have become an indispensable tool in many areas of materials science and quantum chemistry. Even though the Kohn-Sham formulation of the density-functional theory ...(DFT) simplifies the many-body problem significantly, one is still confronted with several numerical challenges. In this article we present the projector augmented-wave (PAW) method as implemented in the GPAW program package (https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/gpaw) using a uniform real-space grid representation of the electronic wavefunctions. Compared to more traditional plane wave or localized basis set approaches, real-space grids offer several advantages, most notably good computational scalability and systematic convergence properties. However, as a unique feature GPAW also facilitates a localized atomic-orbital basis set in addition to the grid. The efficient atomic basis set is complementary to the more accurate grid, and the possibility to seamlessly switch between the two representations provides great flexibility. While DFT allows one to study ground state properties, time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT) provides access to the excited states. We have implemented the two common formulations of TDDFT, namely the linear-response and the time propagation schemes. Electron transport calculations under finite-bias conditions can be performed with GPAW using non-equilibrium Green functions and the localized basis set. In addition to the basic features of the real-space PAW method, we also describe the implementation of selected exchange-correlation functionals, parallelization schemes, ΔSCF-method, x-ray absorption spectra, and maximally localized Wannier orbitals.
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