Liu Wenjie, Hu Xiaolong, Zou Qiushun, Wu Shaoying, Jin Chongjun
State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, People's Republic of China.
Nanotechnology. 2018 Jun 15;29(24):24LT01. doi: 10.1088/1361-6528/aabb7a. Epub 2018 Apr 4.
External light sources are mostly employed to functionalize the plasmonic components, resulting in a bulky footprint. Electrically driven integrated plasmonic devices, combining ultra-compact critical feature sizes with extremely high transmission speeds and low power consumption, can link plasmonics with the present-day electronic world. In an effort to achieve this prospect, suppressing the losses in the plasmonic devices becomes a pressing issue. In this work, we developed a novel polymethyl methacrylate 'bond and peel' method to fabricate metal films with sub-nanometer smooth surfaces on semiconductor wafers. Based on this method, we further fabricated a compact plasmonic source containing a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide with an ultra-smooth metal surface on a GaAs-based light-emitting diode wafer. An increase in propagation length of the SPP mode by a factor of 2.95 was achieved as compared with the conventional device containing a relatively rough metal surface. Numerical calculations further confirmed that the propagation length is comparable to the theoretical prediction on the MIM waveguide with perfectly smooth metal surfaces. This method facilitates low-loss and high-integration of electrically driven plasmonic devices, thus provides an immediate opportunity for the practical application of on-chip integrated plasmonic circuits.
外部光源大多用于使等离子体组件功能化，这导致占用空间较大。电驱动的集成等离子体器件将超紧凑的关键特征尺寸与极高的传输速度和低功耗相结合，能够将等离子体技术与当今的电子世界联系起来。为了实现这一前景，抑制等离子体器件中的损耗成为一个紧迫的问题。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种新颖的聚甲基丙烯酸甲酯“键合与剥离”方法，以在半导体晶圆上制造具有亚纳米光滑表面的金属薄膜。基于此方法，我们进一步在基于砷化镓的发光二极管晶圆上制造了一种紧凑型等离子体源，该源包含具有超光滑金属表面的金属-绝缘体-金属（MIM）波导。与包含相对粗糙金属表面的传统器件相比，表面等离激元极化激元（SPP）模式的传播长度增加了2.95倍。数值计算进一步证实，传播长度与具有完美光滑金属表面的MIM波导的理论预测相当。这种方法有助于电驱动等离子体器件的低损耗和高集成度，从而为片上集成等离子体电路的实际应用提供了直接机会。
