Science· 2026Q1
Electrically driven chiral emission from plasmonic tunnel junctions
- 0citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Researchers integrated tunnel junctions with chiral plasmonic nanohelicoids to achieve electrically induced nanoscale generation of chiral light at the single-particle level.
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Key points
- Tunnel junctions were integrated with chiral plasmonic nanohelicoids.
- This integration enabled electrically induced nanoscale generation of chiral light.
- The generated light is a vortex beam with spin and orbital angular momentum.
- The handedness selectivity of the emitted light exceeds 0.8.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Chirality plays a crucial role in a broad range of processes, including light-matter interactions in physics, chemistry, and biology, while quantum tunneling provides a promising mechanism for light generation at the nanoscale. By integrating tunnel junctions with chiral plasmonic nanohelicoids, we achieved electrically induced nanoscale generation of chiral light at the single-particle level. The tunneling-driven resonant excitation of chiral dipolar modes of the nanohelicoids results in emission of a vortex light beam possessing both spin angular momentum with handedness selectivity of more than 0.8 and orbital angular momentum equal in magnitude and opposite in sign. Our electrically driven approach offers a means for engineering photon spin generation at the nanoscale, highlighting its potential for next-generation optical components in display applications, as well as quantum information processing and photochemistry.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Science, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical EngineeringEngineering