Active Control of Surface Plasmon–Emitter Strong Coupling

Abstract

Strong coupling between quantum emitters and surface plasmon polariton modes in metal nanostructures has been extensively studied in recent years. A natural direction of research and a prerequisite for many applications is the possibility of external, in-situ manipulation of the strength of the coupling. We review research on active control of surface plasmon-emitter strong coupling phenomena. Active control has been demonstrated for a variety of systems, such as metal nanohole arrays, nanoparticles, rods and dimers, combined with photochromic molecules, J-aggregates, and monolayers of MoS 2 , WS 2 and WSe 2. We discuss work on optical switching realized by changing photochromic molecules by UV and visible light between forms that couple strongly or weakly with the electromagnetic field mode of the plasmonic nanostructure. Other forms of optical control such as use of polarization and phase are briefly covered. We review research on electrical, thermal and chemical active control of light-matter coupling in plasmonic systems.

Using Active Surface Plasmons in a Multibit Optical Storage Device to Emulate Long‐Term Synaptic Plasticity

“…Thereby the oscillations of the electrons in the closed conjugation couple to the generated SPPs and inhibit an intersection of these two dispersion relation modes. [ 26,27 ] However, due to the weak coupling of the SPP with the absorption of the DAE molecule used in our configuration, only a broadening and increase of reflection are seen in the dispersion relation rather than a strict splitting.…”

Exciton-surface plasmon polariton interactions

“…One of the central motivations to investigate these hybrid structures is to control light via light on the nanometric length scale and ultrafast timescale by exploiting the non-classical hybridized excitons-SPP modes [4][5][6]24,25], not achievable by current photonic or electronic technologies either due to the diffraction limit or slow response times. Some of the envisaged applications include efficient and directional light sources [75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83], and single-photon emitters [84][85][86][87], all-optical switches [50,51,[88][89][90][91][92][93][94], single-photon transistors, and quantum logic gates [95,96]. There have also been attempts to realize exotic many-body phenomena like room temperature polariton-lasing, -scattering andcondensation [97][98][99][100].…”

“…The main advantage the hybrid nanostructures offer over all-metallic structures is the photonic functionalities like light emission/detection, all-optical switching and modulation. Accordingly, a number of structures have been demonstrated to optically enhance, modulate and control the propagation of guided SPPs by incorporating a gain medium or an active component [6,[88][89][90][91][92][93][94]. Since SPP-exciton hybrid modes exhibit faster relaxation, the coupled systems provide higher modulation speed compared to purely semiconductor counter-part.…”

Charge transport in phthalocyanine thin-film transistors coupled with Fabry–Perot cavities

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] The new hybrid polariton states show part-light and part-matter nature, accompanied by the possibility for intriguing phenomena such as low-threshold polariton lasing, 7,8 high harmonic generation 9,10 and Bose-Einstein condensation. 11,12 Strong coupling has also been reported to directly affect the material properties of molecular systems, including chemical reactivity, [13][14][15][16][17] long-range energy transfer, [18][19][20][21] and work functions. 22 Furthermore, ultrafast microscopy studies demonstrated long-range exciton-polariton transport over several microns for an organic material strongly coupled to a Fabry-Perot cavity.…”