semiconductor alloys for lossless plasmonics

What is it about?

Plasmonics is about concentrating electromagnetic waves in length scales smaller than their wavelength, which offers a diverse variety of applications. It is done by coupling photons to free electrons of a metallic material. However, the lossy nature of plasmonic materials is a stubborn challenge for realizing plasmonic promises. Finding low-loss plasmonic materials is absolutely crucial to the field. We show that some members of a class of semiconductor alloys may become lossless plasmonic materials if their parameters are carefully tuned.

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Photo by Lucas Lenzi on Unsplash

Photo by Lucas Lenzi on Unsplash

Why is it important?

While highly mismatched alloys, the subject of our study, have been used for many different optoelectronic applications, their plasmonic properties have not been investigated extensively. Previously, we offered an analytical study of their possible plasmons and characterized them. Now we show that such plasmons can even go lossless, offering an unexpected solution for the loss problem in plasmonics.