A new perspective on materials for plasmonics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new analytical approach to evaluate plasmonic materials and geometries, balancing propagation length and confinement, to advance applications like bio-sensing and optical interconnects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis framework for comparing plasmonic materials and geometries considering the trade-off between propagation length and confinement.

Findings

New analysis method for plasmonic materials and geometries

Facilitates fair comparison of substrates based on propagation and confinement

Highlights trade-offs impacting plasmonic application performance

Abstract

Surface plasmon polaritons are electromagnetic waves propagating on the surface of a metal. Thanks to subwavelength confinement to the surface, they can concentrate optical energy on the micrometer or even nanometer scale, enabling new applications in bio-sensing, optical interconnects, and nonlinear optics, where small footprint and strong field concentration is of the essence. The major obstacle in developing plasmonic applications is dissipative loss, which limits the propagation length of surface plasmons and broadens the bandwidth of surface-plasmon resonances. Here we present a new analysis of plasmonic materials and geometries that fully considers the trade-off between the propagation length and the degree of confinement of surface plasmon polaritons and allows a fair comparison between different substrates.