Electrochemically Programmable Plasmonic Antennas

Abstract

Plasmonic antennas are building blocks in advanced nano-optical systems due to their ability to tailor optical response based on their geometry. We propose an electrochemical approach to program the optical properties of dipole antennas in a scalable, fast, and energy-efficient manner. These antennas comprise two arms, one serving as an anode and the other a cathode, separated by a solid electrolyte. As a voltage is applied between the antenna arms, a conductive filament either grows or dissolves within the electrolyte, modifying the antenna load. We probe the dynamics of stochastic filament formation and their effects on plasmonic mode programming using a combination of three-dimensional optical and electronic simulations. In particular, we identify device operation regimes in which the charge-transfer plasmon mode can be programmed to be "on" or "off." We also identify, unexpectedly, a strong correlation between DC filament resistance and charge-transfer plasmon mode frequency that is insensitive to the detailed filament morphology. We envision that the scalability of our electrochemical platform can generalize to large-area reconfigurable metamaterials and metasurfaces for on-chip and free-space applications.

Optical memristive switches

“…The atomic scale plasmonic switch presented in [7] explores the ultimate limits of atomic scale resistance switching since the quantum conductance of a single silver filament is used to switch light on or off. A similar resistance switching has also been found in memristive plasmonic antennas where resonances are shifted by single atoms [74][75][76][77].…”

Active plasmonic nanoantenna: an emerging toolbox from photonics to neuroscience

“…A concerted and interdisciplinary effort has been devoted to the development of active systems in realization of postfabrication dynamic reconfigurability in a fully reversible and repeatable, fast, and ideally programmable manner. Until now, a variety of schemes have been proposed and developed in pursuit of in situ active control by electrical [153][154][155], chemical [156][157][158][159], optical [160], thermal [161], or mechanical [162][163][164] [165], tunable flat lenses [166], holograms [167], dynamic switches [66], interferometry photonic platforms [168], neural activity tracking [10,69], and information encryption [169]. Physical mechanisms behind these active plasmonic devices can be understood using lumped optical nanocircuit theory.…”

“…To date, researchers have harnessed strong lightmatter interactions enabled by PNAs to create novel LD PNA configurations with varying degrees of sophistication. Beyond the traditional split nanodipole antenna layout [145,[237][238][239], LD PNAs have been designed in a sphere-, rod-, disc-, and dumbbell-shaped core-shell heterostructure [10,160,177,[240][241][242], heterodimer [73,181,243], composite trimer [244], molecular-level grafting [70,[245][246][247], and atomic-scale filamentary bridge [153,176] configurations. In all these proposed nanoantenna configurations, the thickness of the nanoload is generally not larger than the electromagnetic field decay length of LD PNAs.…”

“…Ultrathin nanoloads not only facilitate the exploitation of the strong light confinement and local field enhancement offered by PNAs but also permit efficient coupling of the local physical mechanism to the external stimuli within the subwavelength feed gap volumes (∼nm 3 ). Until now, a wide range of active materials, including photoconductive semiconductors (silicon) [237], graphene [176], conductive filament [153], metal (silver) [177], metal hydrides (e.g., Pd) [73,243], conductive polymers [10,160,177,[240][241][242], and nonlinear optical materials [32], have been employed as tunable nanoloads (Figure 9). These nanoloads change their optical properties depending on external stimuli, such as pH and ionic strength change, light excitation, temperature variation, phase transition, electrical gating, and magnetic tuning [70,242].…”

In-Situ Plasmonic Tracking Oxygen Evolution Revealing Multistage Oxygen Diffusion and Accumulating Inhibition

“…Meanwhile, another plasmonic resonance mode at around 450 nm remained stable whereas its intensity increased with the electrodeposition cycles, which was attributed to the Ohmic dissipation associated with the charge transport across the junction and the reduction of the capacitive coupling. 34 Furthermore, finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations provide more details about the plasmonic response of the NP-on-conductive film stacked structure. A strong coupling between the adjacent Cu NPs excited by a plane wave and polarized toward the interparticle axis gave rise to a low energy, charge transfer plasmon resonance band at 690 nm, and a high energy, screened bonding plasmonic resonance band at 450 nm ( Fig.…”