Assoc Prof Christian NIJHUIS and his research group from the Department of Chemistry, NUS have developed electronic-plasmonic transducers operating at optical frequencies with high efficiencies which are important to bridge high speed photonics and nanoscale electronics. For integrated circuit (IC) technology, there is a need for optical elements and high speed interconnects with small footprints. Surface plasmon polaritons, which can be seen as light-confined to sub-wavelength dimensions, can carry information at high speeds but they are not diffraction limited. By coupling two electronic-plasmonic transducers based on metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel junctions via a plasmonic waveguide, the researchers have demonstrated on-chip generation, manipulation and detection of these surface plasmons. This work has recently been published in Nature Photonics, 11, 623–627 (2017) doi: 10.1038/s41566-017-0003-5
