Silver and gold are the materials of choice for most plasmonic research but if the other materials look like gold then quite likely they have plasmonics properties like gold. Using this rule, other materials are now being explored. Materials discussed here at Surface Plasmon Photonics include TiO, Transparent Conducting Oxides (TCO), Graphene, Metal Nitrides and more.
With all of these materials there are pros and cons depending on the work being performed. Some are easy to process and can be made into complex three dimensional structures, others are CMOS compatible and yet others are hard and have high melting temperatures. However, it would seem that gold and silver are still the material of choice for most research.
Across IOP Publishing titles we have many articles on the plasmonic properties of several materials, a few examples are below:
Transparent conducting oxides for active hybrid metamaterial devices
Radiative effects in plasmonic aluminum and silver nanospheres and nanorods
Plasmon transport and its guiding in graphene – Plasmon transport and its guiding in graphene
Plasmon-optical phonon hybridization in polar semiconductor nano-wires
Yesterday in Jerusalem we went on a city tour. I was left wondering how much research could be carried out using the quite considerable amount of gold on the roof of the Dome of the Rock.
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Image by David Baum, published under a CC BY 3.0 license
Categories: Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics
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