Bigourdan Florian, Hugonin Jean-Paul, Marquier Francois, Sauvan Christophe, Greffet Jean-Jacques
Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d'Optique Graduate School, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, 91127 Palaiseau, France.
Phys Rev Lett. 2016 Mar 11;116(10):106803. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.106803. Epub 2016 Mar 10.
Light emission by inelastic tunneling has been known for many years. Recently, this technique has been used to generate surface plasmons using a scanning tunneling microscope tip. The emission process suffers from a very low efficiency lower than a photon in 10^{4} electrons. We introduce a resonant plasmonic nanoantenna that allows both enhancing the power conversion to surface plasmon polaritons by more than 2 orders of magnitude and narrowing the emission spectrum. The physics of the emission process is analyzed in terms of local density of states and the efficiency of the nanoantenna to radiate surface plasmon polaritons.
非弹性隧穿发光现象已为人所知多年。最近，该技术已被用于通过扫描隧穿显微镜针尖来产生表面等离子体激元。发射过程的效率非常低，低于每10⁴个电子产生一个光子。我们引入了一种共振等离子体纳米天线，它既能将转换为表面等离子体激元的功率提高两个数量级以上，又能使发射光谱变窄。从局域态密度和纳米天线辐射表面等离子体激元的效率方面对发射过程的物理机制进行了分析。
