Current driven "plasmonic boom" instability in three-dimensional gated periodic ballistic nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper predicts a new plasma wave instability in three-dimensional gated nanostructures with periodically varying width, which can be harnessed to develop powerful, tunable terahertz radiation sources.

Contribution

It introduces a distributed transmission line model for 3D ballistic nanostructures with periodic width variation, revealing a super plasmonic boom instability mechanism.

Findings

Instability occurs when electron drift velocity exceeds plasma wave velocity.

Periodic width variation amplifies plasma wave instability.

Potential for efficient, tunable terahertz radiation sources.

Abstract

A new approach of using distributed transmission line analogy for solving transport equations for ballistic nanostructures is applied for solving the three dimensional problem of the electron transport in gated ballistic nanostructures with periodically changing width. The structures with the varying width allow for modulation of the electron drift velocity while keeping the plasma velocity constant. We predict that in such structures biased by a constant current, a periodic modulation of the electron drift velocity due the varying width results in the instability of the plasma waves if the electron drift velocity to plasma wave velocity ratio changes from below to above unity. The physics of such instability is similar to that of the sonic boom, but, in the periodically modulated structures, this analog of the sonic boom is repeated many times leading to a larger increment of the instability. The constant plasma velocity in the sections of different width leads to the resonant excitation of the unstable plasma modes with the varying bias current. This effect (that we refer to as the super plasmonic boom condition) results in a strong enhancement of the instability. The predicted instability involves the oscillating dipole charge carried by the plasma waves. The plasmons can be efficiently coupled to the terahertz (THz) electromagnetic radiation due to the periodic geometry of the gated structure. Our estimates show that the analyzed instability should enable powerful tunable terahertz electronic sources.