By Brian Santo, contributing writer
Back in an earlier technology age, scientists perhaps naively thought that electronic circuits would be replaced by photonic devices, which promised to be both smaller and faster that electronic devices. That was way back in 2013, and, oh, to return to such innocent times! The problem with photons (and here’s something you don’t hear every day) is that they’re too darn big . Plasmons are smaller and just as fast, and a handful of labs around the world that have been investigating the esoteric phenomenon are racing each other to devise nanoelectronics that can take advantage of it.
The latest organization to tout a plasmonic advance is the National University of Singapore (NUS), which recently announced a plasmonic-electronic converter that can bridge electronics with plasmonics directly.
That could be quite an advance, because conversion is typically a two-step process. Electrons are typically used to generate photons, and those photons are then employed to excite plasmons.
Researchers at NUS have devised a one-step process to convert electrical signals directly into plasmonic signals, and vice versa. The process relies on tunneling; electrons travel from one electrode to another, and in the process excite plasmons.
The NUS plasmonic-electronic transducer is 10,000 times smaller than the optical element it obviates, the researchers told OpenGov , a Singaporean information agency. Initial tests peg the electron-to-plasmon conversion efficiency at greater than 10 per cent, which the NUS researchers said is more than a thousand times higher than previously reported.
A plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Plasmons can be detected as waves of electrons that move along the surface of a metal/dielectric interface. Electrons can move at about the same speed as photons, but are smaller.
Physicists are no doubt cringing in horror. As both particles and waves, photons have no “size” per se. The roughly analogous measure for photons is wavelength. Technically, neither electrons nor plasmons have “size” either. That said, in the context of physical nanoelectronics devices, the physical space required for interaction with photons is larger than the physical space required for interaction with electrons and plasmons.
The NUS research team has filed four patents for their invention, and is collaborating with industry partners to integrate the plasmonic-electronic transducers with existing technologies.
Meanwhile, a group based at ETF in Zurich with colleagues at the University of Washington in the US are combining plasmonics with nonlinear organic compounds (plasmonic organic hybrids , or POH) to develop components such as modulators that could be used in photonic systems.
Scientists in other fields are excited about the potential for plasmonics for several reasons. Medical researchers are excited about plasmonic devices being potentially useful as detectors in microfluidics , for example.
In the interest of science, we would like to state that these plasmons are completely different from Italian Plasmons, which are biscotto concalcio , ferro evitamine selezionate , è attentamente studiata per accompagnare il tuo bambino durante la crescita.
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