Stimulated plasmon polariton scattering.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32788659.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-17810-4 and PMC identifier 7423978.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Plasmon and phonon polaritons of two-dimensional (2D) and van-der-Waals materials have recently gained substantial interest. Unfortunately, they are notoriously hard to observe in linear response because of their strong confinement, low frequency and longitudinal mode symmetry. Here, we propose an approach of harnessing nonlinear resonant scattering that we call stimulated plasmon polariton scattering (SPPS) in analogy to the opto-acoustic stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). We show that SPPS allows to excite, amplify and detect 2D plasmon and phonon polaritons all across the THz-range while requiring only optical components in the near-IR or visible range. We present a coupled-mode theory framework for SPPS and based on this find that SPPS power gains exceed the very top gains observed in on-chip SBS by at least an order of magnitude. This opens exciting possibilities to fundamental studies of 2D materials and will help closing the THz gap in spectroscopy and information technology.