Josephson surface plasmons in spatially confined cuprate superconductors

Abstract

In this work, we generalize the theory of localized surface plasmons to the case of high-Tc cuprate superconductors, spatially confined in the form of small spherical particles. At variance from ordinary metals, cuprate superconductors are characterized by a low-energy bulk excitation known as the Josephson plasma wave (JPW), arising from interlayer tunneling of the condensate along the c-axis. The effect of the JPW is revealed in a characteristic spectrum of surface excitations, which we call Josephson surface plasmons. Our results, which apply to any material with a strongly anisotropic electromagnetic response, are worked out in detail for the case of multilayered superconductors supporting both low-frequency (acoustic) and transverse-optical JPW. Spatial confinement of the Josephson plasma waves may represent a new degree of freedom to engineer their frequencies and to explore the link between interlayer tunnelling and high-Tc superconductivity.

References in corpus (5)

• Terahertz Josephson plasma waves in layered superconductors: spectrum, generation, nonlinear, and quantum phenomena
• Layered superconductors as negative-refractive-index metamaterials
• Mie plasmons: modes volumes, quality factors and coupling strengths (Purcell factor) to a dipolar emitter
• Surface Plasma Waves Across the Layers of Intrinsic Josephson Junctions
• Oblique surface Josephson plasma waves in layered superconductors

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Hamiltonian optics of hyperbolic polaritons in nanogranules
• Generalized Josephson plasmons in bilayer superconductors
• Investigating Josephson plasmons in layered cuprates via nonlinear terahertz spectroscopy
• Theory for Anomalous Terahertz Emission in Striped Cuprate Superconductors