Local excitation of surface plasmon polaritons using nitrogen-vacancy centers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that nanodiamonds with multiple nitrogen-vacancy centers can efficiently excite surface plasmon polaritons at silver surfaces, enabling sub-wavelength plasmonic sources for integrated applications.

Contribution

It introduces a method to locally excite SPPs using nanodiamonds with NV centers, highlighting their potential as efficient nanoscale plasmonic sources.

Findings

Distinct wavelength spectra for illuminated and scattering NDs show SPP propagation loss.

Nanodiamonds with NV centers can serve as sub-wavelength SPP sources.

Short-wavelength filtering observed due to SPP propagation loss.

Abstract

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are locally excited at silver surfaces using (~100) nm-sized nanodiamonds (NDs) with multiple nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers (~400). The fluorescence from an externally illuminated (at 532 nm) ND and from nearby NDs, which are not illuminated but produce out-of-plane scattering of SPPs excited by the illuminated ND, exhibit distinctly different wavelength spectra, showing short-wavelength filtering due to the SPP propagation loss. The results indicate that NDs with multiple NV centers can be used as efficient sub-wavelength SPP sources in planar integrated plasmonics for various applications.