Interplay of structural and temperature effects on plasmonic excitations at noble-metal interfaces

Abstract

The interplay of structural and electronic properties on plasmon modes was investigated for a thin Ag film grown at room temperature on Cu(111). Surface plasmons are confined within Ag grains, as indicated by the analysis of their dispersion relationship, which is dispersionless up to a critical wave-vector. Surface plasmon confinement is removed upon annealing at 400 K. The thermal treatment induces a flattening of the Ag adlayer with a merging of Ag islands, and, moreover, a strong enhancement of surface conductivity.

The influence of electron confinement, quantum size effects, and film morphology on the dispersion and the damping of plasmonic modes in Ag and Au thin films

“…[64][65][66][67]. Despite the abundant number of studies regarding the electronic collective excitations in noble-metal (Ag, Au) thin films [20,38,39,[41][42][43], no review exists on this subject.…”

“…Among the physical properties of nanoscale metal films, their collective electronic excitations play a crucial role in many relevant physical processes [20,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. Several previous reviews [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] addressed various aspects of collective electronic modes.…”

A Simple Nanoscale Plasmonic Square-Shaped Ring Resonator Waveguide

“…Plasmonics is a rapidly growing research field [1][2][3], which covers several aspects of surface plasmons [4,5] towards realization of surface-plasmon-based devices [6][7][8][9][10]: plasmonic waveguides [11], plasmonic light-emitting devices [12], plasmonic solar cells [13] and plasma-wave THz photodetection [14,15]. Waveguide-based plasmonic structures utilizing surface plasmon polariton (SPP) are promising for their capability of high subwavelength scale confinement and low propagation loss [16,17], which could lead to a high-speed, miniaturized and integrated electrooptical technology.…”

Design of a Low Loss Silicon Based Hybrid Dielectric-Loaded Plasmonic Waveguide and a Compact High Performance Optical Resonator

“…Recently, many applications related to collective electronic excitations (plasmons) have emerged, giving rise to new research fields of plasmonics [1][2][3][4][5]. Lately, surface plasmon polariton waveguides (SPPWGs) have attracted a great deal of attention as promising means for information transmission at nano scale due to strong local confinement of electromagnetic (EM) energy on sub-wavelength scale [6].…”