Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 60: Poster Session IV (Solid/liquid interfaces; Semiconductors; Oxides and insulators; Graphene; Plasmonics and nanooptics; Electronic Structure; Surface chemical reactions; Heterogeneous catalysis)

O 60.75: Poster

Wednesday, March 16, 2011, 17:30–21:00, P4

Coupled exciton-plasmon modes in metal-dye hybrid systems — •Sabine Auer, David Leipold, and Erich Runge — Technische Universität Ilmenau, 98693 Ilmenau, Germany

At nano-structured metal surfaces, visible light can be localized to spatial regions well below the diffraction limit by the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). A major challenge for future devices employing SPPs is the fact that SPPs can only travel for very short ranges since they are strongly damped by Ohmic losses in the metal. One idea to overcome this problem is to compensate the damping by coupling of the SPPs to active media (e.g., dyes [1] or quantum wells [2]).

We present calculation results for the coupling of quantum mechanical excitations in a j-aggregated dye with the SPP excitation at a metal grating [1]. The strong coupling (energy transfer) of the SPP and the dye resonance manifests itself as avoided crossing in the dispersion relation. At resonance, the coupled eigenmodes show excitonic as well as plasmonic features.

The good agreement of the calculation with the experiment confirms that our description can be used in future work on the design of devices with SPPs coupled to gain media.

[1] P. Vasa, et al., “Ultrafast control of strong coupling in metal-molecular aggregate hybrid nanostructures”, ACS Nano, accepted. [2] P. Vasa, et al., “Coherent exciton–surface-plasmon-polariton interaction in hybrid metal-semiconductor nanostructures”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 116801 (2008).