Probing the Ultimate Limits of Plasmonic Enhancement

By C. Ciracì, R. T. Hill, J. Mock, Y. Urzhumov, Antonio I. Fernandez-Dominguez, S. A. Maier, John B. Pendry, A. Chilkoti, David R. Smith. Science, 2012

1,103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Boundaries on Plasmonic Excitations The localization of optical fields within a metal nanostructure can achieve strengths that are orders of magnitude greater than that of the incident field. This focusing and enhancement of the optical field maybe useful in sensing, nonlinear optics, and optical scattering applications. In probing the properties of metallic nanoparticles, Ciracì et al. (p. 1072; see the cover) show that the enhancement is limited by the electronic response of the metal, which has implications for the ultimate performance of nanophotonic systems. The nonlocal dielectric response of metals places a fundamental limit on the performance of plasmonic optical devices. Metals support surface plasmons at optical wavelengths and have the ability to localize light to subwavelength regions. The field enhancements that occur in these regions set the ultimate limitations on a wide range of nonlinear and quantum optical phenomena. We found that the dominant limiting factor is not the resistive loss of the metal, but rather the intrinsic nonlocality of its dielectric response. A semiclassical model of the electronic response of a metal places strict bounds on the ultimate field enhancement. To demonstrate the accuracy of this model, we studied optical scattering from gold nanoparticles spaced a few angstroms from a gold film. The bounds derived from the models and experiments impose limitations on all nanophotonic systems.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16ff3c9c2ea46102212be13ceb28af56d95c8af1

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum Plasmonics (2016, methodology): “hancement whereas a quantum calculation properly models the surface charge density as being spread over a finite volume, and thus predicts a reduced field enhancement [50].”
Blueshift of the surface plasmon resonance in silver nanoparticles studied with EELS (2012, result): “These predictions are however in conflict both with earlier [6–9] and with more recent experimental results, which have shown a size dependency of the localized SP resonance in noble metal nanoparticles in the size range of 1-10 nm [10] and pronounced deviations for dimer geometries [11, 12].”
Theory of metasurface based perfect absorbers (2017, background): “This has been investigated in detail in [59, 64].”
Bimetallic nanostructures: combining plasmonic and catalytic metals for photocatalysis (2019, background): “However, as the two metals are brought closer together, quantum effects, like localization of surface charges (gap <2-5 nm) and tunneling (gap <1 nm), can decrease the plasmonic enhancement [45,55,56].”