Stimulated plasmon polariton scattering

Abstract

Plasmon and phonon polaritons of two-dimensional (2D) and van-der-Waals materials have recently gained substantial interest. Unfortunately, they are notoriously hard to observe in linear response because of their strong confinement, low frequency and longitudinal mode symmetry. Here, we propose an approach of harnessing nonlinear resonant scattering that we call stimulated plasmon polariton scattering (SPPS) in analogy to the opto-acoustic stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). We show that SPPS allows to excite, amplify and detect 2D plasmon and phonon polaritons all across the THz-range while requiring only optical components in the near-IR or visible range. We present a coupled-mode theory framework for SPPS and based on this find that SPPS power gains exceed the very top gains observed in on-chip SBS by at least an order of magnitude. This opens exciting possibilities to fundamental studies of 2D materials and will help closing the THz gap in spectroscopy and information technology.

Mesoscopic electrodynamics at metal surfaces

“…Depending on the level of doping and the ratio of optical energy ℏ𝜔 relative to the Fermi energy  F , quantum nonlocal effects can manifest in graphene nanostructures of a finite dimension [73,[348][349][350][351] or when the large-q ∥ response of graphene is probed, e.g. by singular metasurfaces [352], electron beams [353,354] or by in-elastic scattering processes [355]. In addition, the termination of the graphene lattice can also lead to electronic edge states at the Dirac point, e.g.…”

Graphene as a source of entangled plasmons

“…As mentioned above, in a long ribbon such kinematic constraints can be met without delicate fine-tuning. Another related work studied photon-plasmon difference frequency generation [25,48] and entanglement [49], which is a phenomenon intermediate between the usual all-photon PDC [33] and our fully plasmonic PDC.…”