Single Atom Plasmonic Switch
arXiv:1508.07748 · doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b04537
Abstract
The atom sets an ultimate scaling limit to Moores law in the electronics industry. And while electronics research already explores atomic scales devices, photonics research still deals with devices at the micrometer scale. Here we demonstrate that photonic scaling-similar to electronics-is only limited by the atom. More precisely, we introduce an electrically controlled single atom plasmonic switch. The switch allows for fast and reproducible switching by means of the relocation of an individual or at most -- a few atoms in a plasmonic cavity. Depending on the location of the atom either of two distinct plasmonic cavity resonance states are supported. Experimental results show reversible digital optical switching with an extinction ration of 10 dB and operation at room temperature with femtojoule (fJ) power consumption for a single switch operation. This demonstration of a CMOS compatible, integrated quantum device allowing to control photons at the single-atom level opens intriguing perspectives for a fully integrated and highly scalable chip platform -- a platform where optics, electronics and memory may be controlled at the single-atom level.
References in corpus (8)
- Density functional method for nonequilibrium electron transport
- Quantum properties of atomic-sized conductors
- All-Optical Routing of Single Photons by a One-Atom Switch Controlled by a Single Photon
- A one femtojoule athermal silicon modulator
- Fiber-optical switch controlled by a single atom
- Ultracompact Nano-Mechanical Plasmonic Phase Modulators
- Quantized evolution of the plasmonic response in a stretched nanorod
- Optical response of metallic nanojunctions driven by single atom motion
Cited by in corpus (14)
- Electrical Tuning of Phase Change Antennas and Metasurfaces
- Tunnel field-effect transistors for sensitive terahertz detection
- Advances in ultrafast plasmonics
- Probing the Electrical Switching of a Memristive Optical Antenna by STEM EELS
- Multilevel nonvolatile optoelectronic memory based on memristive plasmonic tunnel junctions
- Atomic-scale structural fluctuations of a plasmonic cavity
- Inelastic Light Scattering in the Vicinity of a Single-Atom Quantum Point Contact in a Plasmonic Picocavity
- Acoustic wave modulation of gap plasmon cavities
- Designing plasmonic eigenstates for optical signal transmission in planar channel devices
- Multi-faceted plasmonic nanocavities
- On the Excitation and Radiative Decay Rates of Plasmonic Nanoantennas
- Association Between Gold Grain Orientation And Its Periodic Steps Formed At The Gold/Substrate Interface
- Polarization-Insensitive Integration of Nanoparticle-on-a-Slit Cavities with Dielectric Waveguides for On-chip Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy
- Reconsidering the design of planar plasmonic lasers: gain, gap layers, and mode competition