Spontaneous hot-electron light emission from electron-fed optical antennas
Abstract
Nanoscale electronics and photonics are among the most promising research areas providing functional nano-components for data transfer and signal processing. By adopting metal-based optical antennas as a disruptive technological vehicle, we demonstrate that these two device-generating technologies can be interfaced to create an electronically-driven self-emitting unit. This nanoscale plasmonic transmitter operates by injecting electrons in a contacted tunneling antenna feedgap. Under certain operating conditions, we show that the antenna enters a highly nonlinear regime in which the energy of the emitted photons exceeds the quantum limit imposed by the applied bias. We propose a model based upon the spontaneous emission of hot electrons that correctly reproduces the experimental findings. The electron-fed optical antennas described here are critical devices for interfacing electrons and photons, enabling thus the development of optical transceivers for on-chip wireless broadcasting of information at the nanoscale.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.08461,
title = {Spontaneous hot-electron light emission from electron-fed optical antennas},
author = {Mickael Buret and Alexander V. Uskov and Jean Dellinger and Nicolas Cazier and Marie-Maxime Mennemanteuil and Johann Berthelot and Igor V. Smetanin and Igor E. Protsenko and Gérard Colas-des-Francs and Alexandre Bouhelier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.08461},
year = {2015}
}