Magnesium for Dynamic Nanoplasmonics

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of magnesium as a dynamic plasmonic metal, offering tunable optical properties for nanoplasmonic applications, contrasting with traditional static metals like gold and silver.

Contribution

It introduces magnesium as a promising metal for dynamic nanoplasmonics, highlighting its tunable optical responses and potential advantages over conventional metals.

Findings

Magnesium exhibits tunable plasmonic properties.

Magnesium's optical responses can be dynamically controlled.

Potential for magnesium to enable new nanoplasmonic devices.

Abstract

The key component of nanoplasmonics is metals. For a long time, gold and silver have been the metals of choice for constructing plasmonic nanodevices because of their excellent optical properties. However, these metals possess a common characteristic, i.e., their optical responses are static. The past decade has been witnessed tremendous interest in dynamic control of the optical properties of plasmonic nanostructures. To enable dynamic functionality, several approaches have been proposed and implemented. For instance, plasmonic nanostructures can be fabricated on stretchable substrates or on programmable templates so that the interactions between the constituent metal nanoparticles and therefore the optical responses of the plasmonic systems can be dynamically changed. Also, plasmonic nanostructures can be embedded in tunable dielectric materials, taking advantage of the sensitive dependence of the localized surface plasmon resonances on the neighboring environment. Another approach, which is probably the most intriguing one, is to directly regulate the carrier densities and dielectric functions of the metals themselves.