Plasmons in ballistic nanostructures with stubs: transmission line approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a transmission line model with stubs to optimize boundary conditions and control plasma velocities in ballistic nanostructures, enhancing the performance of THz devices.

Contribution

It develops a compact transmission line model with stub structures to improve boundary condition control and plasma wave manipulation in THz plasmonic devices.

Findings

Stub structures effectively control boundary conditions.

Periodic stubs can slow down plasma waves.

Designs improve THz detector and source performance.

Abstract

The plasma wave instabilities in ballistic Field Effect Transistors (FETs) have a promise of developing sensitive THz detectors and efficient THz sources. One of the difficulties in achieving efficient resonant plasmonic detection and generation is assuring proper boundary conditions at the contacts and at the heterointerfaces and tuning the plasma velocity. We propose using the tunable narrow channel regions of an increased width, which we call "stubs" for optimizing the boundary conditions and for controlling the plasma velocity. We developed a compact model for THz plasmonic devices using the transmission line (TL) analogy. The mathematics of the problem is similar to the mathematics of a TL with a stub. We applied this model to demonstrate that the stubs could effectively control the boundary conditions and/or the conditions at interfaces. We derived and solved the dispersion equation for the device with the stubs and showed that periodic or aperiodic systems of stubs allow for slowing down the plasma waves in a controllable manner in a wide range. Our results show that the stub designs provide a way to achieve the optimum boundary conditions and could also be used for multi finger structures - stub plasmonic crystals - yielding better performance of THz electronic detectors, modulators, mixers, frequency multipliers and sources.