Towards femtosecond on-chip electronics based on plasmonic hot electron nano-emitters

Abstract

To combine the advantages of ultrafast femtosecond nano-optics with an on-chip communication scheme, optical signals with a frequency of several hundreds of THz need to be down-converted to coherent electronic signals propagating on-chip. So far, this has not been achieved because of the overall slow response time of nanoscale electronic circuits. Here, we demonstrate that 14 fs optical pulses in the near-infrared can drive electronic on-chip circuits with a prospective bandwidth up to 10 THz. The corresponding electronic pulses propagate in macroscopic striplines on a millimeter scale. We exploit femtosecond photoswitches based on asymmetric, nanoscale metal junctions to drive the pulses. The non-linear ultrafast response is based on a plasmonically enhanced, multiphoton absorption resulting in a field emission of ballistic hot electrons propagating across the nanoscale junctions. Our results pave the way towards femtosecond electronics integrated in wafer-scale THz circuits.

Ultrafast Field‐Emission Electron Sources Based on Nanomaterials

“…This development not only advances time‐resolved electron characterization into an attosecond time domain but also provides an attosecond control and measurement methodology . Thus, OFE is at the core of various modern attosecond technologies, such as attosecond electron microscopy, petahertz electronic devices, attosecond light sources, and optical‐phase detectors …”

“…Metal nanostructures, such as nanotips, nanowires, nanospheres, nanorods, nanotriangles, nanostars, and composite bow‐tie and nanorod antennae,[36,45b,53,62] are of particular interest for OFE experiments due to their relatively simple electronic structures and strong plasmonic near‐field enhancement. Many novel electron dynamics phenomena have been discovered during the investigation of OFE from metallic tips in this way.…”

Time-resolved impurity-invisibility in graphene nanoribbons

“…Further, our spatio-temporal-resolved results showed that the impurities induce rearrangement and focusing of the current pathways along the graphene nanoribbons. In addition to the stationary picture, we further argue that graphene nanoribbons could serve as excellent probes or chemical sensors via ultrafast transport measurements [16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…This novel biosensor technology provides real-time information about the underlying physical and chemical mechanisms. These findings motivate ultrafast sensing devices as present transport measurements are able to resolve temporal information at sub-picosecond time scales [16][17][18][19][20].…”

Transient dynamics in interacting nanojunctions within self-consistent perturbation theory

“…For decades, studies of quantum transport in nanoscale devices have mainly focused on steady state properties [1]. While the potential interest of transient dynamics was pointed out long ago [2,3] such studies have recently received an increasing attention in connection with advances in experimental techniques for time-resolved measurements [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. These studies are also motivated by the important technological goal of increasing the operation speed of devices while reducing their energy consumption.…”