Coulomb Blockade Plasmonic Switch

Tunnel resistance can be modulated with bias via the Coulomb blockade effect, which gives a highly nonlinear response current. Here we investigate the optical response of a metal–insulator–­nanoparticle–insulator–metal structure and show switching of a plasmonic gap from insulator to conductor via C...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nano letters 2017-04, Vol.17 (4), p.2584-2588
Main Authors: Xiang, Dao, Wu, Jian, Gordon, Reuven
Format: Article
Language:English
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Tunnel resistance can be modulated with bias via the Coulomb blockade effect, which gives a highly nonlinear response current. Here we investigate the optical response of a metal–insulator–­nanoparticle–insulator–metal structure and show switching of a plasmonic gap from insulator to conductor via Coulomb blockade. By introducing a sufficiently large charging energy in the tunnelling gap, the Coulomb blockade allows for a conductor (tunneling) to insulator (capacitor) transition. The tunnelling electrons can be delocalized over the nanocapacitor again when a high energy penalty is added with bias. We demonstrate that this has a huge impact on the plasmonic resonance of a 0.51 nm tunneling gap with ∼70% change in normalized optical loss. Because this structure has a tiny capacitance, there is potential to harness the effect for high-speed switching.
ISSN:1530-6984
1530-6992
DOI:10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b00360