Invited Paper
Ultimate Limit of Field Confinement by Surface Plasmon Polaritons

We show that electric field confinement in surface plasmon polaritons propagatingor localized at the metal/dielectric interfaces enhances the loss due to Landau damping and which effectively limits the degree of confinement itself. We prove that Landau damping and associated with it surface collision damping follow directly from Lindhard formula for the dielectric constant of free electron gas Using coupled mode theory we obtain expressions for maximum field confinement in demers and more complicated structures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even if all the conventional loss mechanisms, caused by phonons, electron-electron, and interface roughness scattering, were eliminated, the maximum attainable degree of confinement and the loss accompanying it would not change significantly compared to the best existing plasmonic materials, such as silver.

jakek@jhu.edu