Surface plasmon polaritons in a semi-bounded degenerate plasma: role of spatial dispersion and collisions

Abstract

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in a semi-bounded degenerate plasma (e.g., a metal) are studied using the quasiclassical mean-field kinetic model, taking into account the spatial dispersion of the plasma (due to quantum degeneracy of electrons) and electron-ion (electron-lattice, for metals) collisions. SPP dispersion and damping are obtained in both retarded ($\omega /k_z\sim c$) and non-retarded ($\omega /k_z\ll c$) regions, as well as in between. It is shown that the plasma spatial dispersion significantly affects the properties of SPPs, especially at short wavelengths (less than the collisionless skin depth, $\lambda \lesssim c/{\omega }_{pe}$). Namely, the collisionless (Landau) damping of SPPs (due to spatial dispersion) is comparable to the purely collisional (Ohmic) damping (due to electron-lattice collisions) in a wide range of SPP wavelengths, e.g., from $\lambda \sim 20$ nm to $\lambda \sim 0.8$ nm for SPP in gold at T=293 K, and from $\lambda \sim 400$ nm to $\lambda \sim 0.7$ nm for SPPs in gold at T=100 K. The spatial dispersion is also shown to affect, in a qualitative way, the dispersion of SPPs at short wavelengths $\lambda \lesssim c/{\omega }_{pe}$.

References in corpus (2)

• Theory of surface plasmons and surface-plasmon polaritons
• New Quantum Limits in Plasmonic Devices

Cited by in corpus (1)

• A new type of surface waves in a fully degenerate quantum plasma