Electrically driven optical antennas

By J. Kern, R. Kullock, J. Prangsma, M. Emmerling, M. Kamp, B. Hecht. Nature Photonics, 2015

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Researchers demonstrate an electrically driven nanoscale transmitter based on the broadband quantum shot noise of electrons tunnelling across a feed gap. Unlike radiowave antennas, so far optical nanoantennas cannot be fed by electrical generators. Instead, they are driven by light1 or indirectly via excited discrete states in active materials2,3 in their vicinity. Here we demonstrate the direct electrical driving of an in-plane optical antenna by the broadband quantum-shot noise of electrons tunnelling across its feed gap. The spectrum of the emitted photons is determined by the antenna geometry and can be tuned via the applied voltage. Moreover, the direction and polarization of the light emission are controlled by the antenna resonance, which also improves the external quantum efficiency by up to two orders of magnitude. The one-material planar design offers facile integration of electrical and optical circuits and thus represents a new paradigm for interfacing electrons and photons at the nanometre scale, for example for on-chip wireless communication and highly configurable electrically driven subwavelength photon sources.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d82ff65ce172487e4678dbac273e187fd5691e3a

Citations in the corpus

• Roadmap on plasmonics (2018, unknown): “In contrast, a reliable integration of electrical contacts with nanometer-gap plasmonic antennas would allow to exploit the full potential of quantum plasmonics for active opto-electronic devices, nonlinear optics and light emission [141].”