Abstract
We report on the low-energy, electrical generation of light beams in specific directions from planar elliptical microstructures. The emission direction of the beam is determined by the microstructure eccentricity. A very simple, broadband, optical antenna design is used, which consists of a single elliptical slit etched into a gold film. The light beam source is driven by an electrical nanosource of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) that is located at one focus of the ellipse. In this study, SPPs are generated through inelastic electron tunneling between a gold surface and the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.
Highlights
With the ever-growing demand for higher information capacity and the diversification of applications, the integration of nanophotonics with nanoelectronics in microdevices has never been more relevant than [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
The inelastic effects of the tunnel current between the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip and the surface of the gold film generate circular waves of surface plasmon polaritons, Recently, we have demonstrated that the electrical excitation of SPPs in the center of a plasmonic lens consisting of a single circular slit etched in a gold film results in the emission of a spectrally broad cylindrical vector beam of light [40,41]
We investigate in the present paper the low-energy electrical excitation and the resulting light beams from single elliptical antennas consisting of an elliptical slit etched in a gold film
Summary
With the ever-growing demand for higher information capacity and the diversification of applications, the integration of nanophotonics with nanoelectronics in microdevices has never been more relevant than [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. We theoretically and experimentally show that when the excitation takes place at one of the two focii, these elliptical slits act as highly directional antennas that convert electrically excited SPPs into light beams that are emitted in specific directions as determined by the ellipse eccentricity and the refractive index of the surrounding medium.
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