title: Coulomb Blockade Plasmonic Switch.
abstract: Tunnel resistance can be modulated with bias via the Coulomb blockade effect, which gives a highly nonlinear response current. Here we investigate the optical response of a metal-insulator-nanoparticle-insulator-metal structure and show switching of a plasmonic gap from insulator to conductor via Coulomb blockade. By introducing a sufficiently large charging energy in the tunnelling gap, the Coulomb blockade allows for a conductor (tunneling) to insulator (capacitor) transition. The tunnelling electrons can be delocalized over the nanocapacitor again when a high energy penalty is added with bias. We demonstrate that this has a huge impact on the plasmonic resonance of a 0.51 nm tunneling gap with ∼70% change in normalized optical loss. Because this structure has a tiny capacitance, there is potential to harness the effect for high-speed switching.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria , Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2, Canada.
authors.forename: Dao
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria , Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2, Canada.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria , Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2, Canada.
authors.forename: Reuven
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1485-6067
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gordon
keywords: Coulomb blockade; nanoparticles; quantum tunnelling; switching