Graphene plasmons go ballistic
Monday, January 12, 2015 - 09:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Squeezing light into tiny circuits and controlling its flow electrically is a holy grail that has become a realistic scenario thanks to the discovery of graphene. This tantalizing achievement is realized by exploiting so-called plasmons, in which electrons and light move together as one coherent wave. Plasmons guided by graphene -a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms - are remarkable as they can be confined to length scales of nanometers, up to two hundred times below the wavelength of light. An important hurdle until now has been the rapid loss of energy that these plasmons experience, limiting the range over which they could travel.