Replacing Noble Metals with Alternative Materials in Plasmonics and Metamaterials: how good an idea?

Abstract

Noble metals that currently dominate the fields of plasmonics and metamaterials suffer from large ohmic losses. New plasmonic materials, such as doped oxides and nitrides, have smaller material loss, and, using them in place of metals carries promise of reduced-loss plasmonic and metamaterial structures, with sharper resonances and higher field concentration. This promise is put to a rigorous analytical test in this work which reveals that having low material loss is not sufficient to have a reduced modal loss in plasmonic structures. To reduce the modal loss it is absolutely necessary for the plasma frequency to be significantly higher than the operational frequency. Using examples of nanoparticle plasmons and gap plasmons one comes to the conclusion that even in the mid-infrared spectrum metals continue to hold advantage over the alternative media. The new materials may still find application niche where the high absorption loss is beneficial, e.g. in medicine and thermal photovoltaics.

References in corpus (4)

• How to face the loss in plasmonics and metamaterials
• A comparison of graphene, superconductors and metals as conductors for metamaterials and plasmonics
• Magnetic and Electric Excitations in Split Ring Resonators
• Thermal excitation of plasmons for near-field thermophotovoltaics

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• Multipolar scattering analysis of hybrid metal-dielectric nanostructures
• Ultrafast electron dynamics in platinum and gold thin films driven by optical and terahertz fields
• Resonant Fully dielectric metasurfaces for ultrafast Terahertz pulse generation
• Hybrid Epsilon-Near-Zero Modes of Photonic Gap Antennas
• Genetic-algorithm-aided ultra-broadband perfect absorbers using plasmonic metamaterials