Intersubband plasmons in the quantum limit in gated and aligned carbon nanotubes

Kazuhiro Yanagi,Weilu Gao,Yohei Yomogida,Ryotaro Okada,Fumiya Katsutani,Yota Ichinose,Junichiro Kono

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-03381-y

Kazuhiro Yanagi, Weilu Gao + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03381-y

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Abstract

Confined electrons collectively oscillate in response to light, resulting in a plasmon resonance whose frequency is determined by the electron density and the size and shape of the confinement structure. Plasmons in metallic particles typically occur in the classical regime where the characteristic quantum level spacing is negligibly small compared to the plasma frequency. In doped semiconductor quantum wells, quantum plasmon excitations can be observed, where the quantization energy exceeds the plasma frequency. Such intersubband plasmons occur in the mid- and far-infrared ranges and exhibit a variety of dynamic many-body effects. Here, we report the observation of intersubband plasmons in carbon nanotubes, where both the quantization and plasma frequencies are larger than those of typical quantum wells by three orders of magnitude. As a result, we observed a pronounced absorption peak in the near-infrared. Specifically, we observed the near-infrared plasmon peak in gated films of aligned single-wall carbon nanotubes only for probe light polarized perpendicular to the nanotube axis and only when carriers are present either in the conduction or valence band. Both the intensity and frequency of the peak were found to increase with the carrier density, consistent with the plasmonic nature of the resonance. Our observation of gate-controlled quantum plasmons in aligned carbon nanotubes will not only pave the way for the development of carbon-based near-infrared optoelectronic devices but also allow us to study the collective dynamic response of interacting electrons in one dimension.

Highlights

Confined electrons collectively oscillate in response to light, resulting in a plasmon resonance whose frequency is determined by the electron density and the size and shape of the confinement structure
There have been reports on observations of far-infrared intersubband plasmons (ISBPs) in lithographically defined semiconductor quantum wires[15], but there has been no convincing evidence for ISBPs in nanomaterials such as single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs)
In the ideal case of a semiconductor quantum wells (QWs) where the two subbands are parallel in in-plane (x–y) dispersions (Fig. 1b), the joint density of states has a single symmetric peak (Fig. 1c), which leads to strong resonant absorption when the incident photon energy coincides with the subband separation a zy x bE

Summary

Introduction

Confined electrons collectively oscillate in response to light, resulting in a plasmon resonance whose frequency is determined by the electron density and the size and shape of the confinement structure. We observed the near-infrared plasmon peak in gated films of aligned single-wall carbon nanotubes only for probe light polarized perpendicular to the nanotube axis and only when carriers are present either in the conduction or valence band Both the intensity and frequency of the peak were found to increase with the carrier density, consistent with the plasmonic nature of the resonance. It has been shown that intersubband transitions in QWs are intrinsically collective in nature, involving many interacting and quantum-confined electrons, and cannot be described by a single-particle model[1,2,3,4] As a result, they are generally referred to as intersubband plasmons (ISBPs)[5,6,7,8,9], for which both plasmonic effects and quantum confinement effects are important in determining the resonance frequency. We present unambiguous evidence for ISBPs in gated and aligned SWCNTs through polarization-dependent absorption spectroscopy, elucidating the origin of the observed unknown feature in these previous studies on doped SWCNTs

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