Advanced and Conceptual Physics

[Kyrillos]

Quoting the book here:

The goal of plasmaonics is to "squeeze" light so that one can manipulate objects at the nanoscale, espicially on the surface of metals. The reason metals conduct electricity is that electrons are loosely bound to metal atoms, so they can freely move along the surface of the metal lattice. The electricity flowing in your home represents the smooth flow of these loosely bound electrons on the metal surface. But under certain conditions, when a light beam collides with the metal surface, the electrons can vibrate in unison with the original light beam, creating a wavelike motions of the electrons on the metal surface (called plasmons), and these wavelike motions beat in unison with the original light beam. More important, one can "squeeze" these plasmons so that they have the same frequency as the orignal beam(and hence carry the same information) but have a much smaller wavelength. In principle, one might then cram these squeezed waves into nanowires. As with photonic crystals, the ultimate goal of plasmonics is to create computer chips that compute using light, rather than electricity."

Enjoy your light reading for the day. This is from a segement entitled "Invisibility via plasmonics"

[lamchopz]

Thanks for that.

It makes much more sense now. I was wondering what was meant by "aligning atoms in a rhythm" to create a current. Seems we use the electrons after all in this specific description. By atoms, you probably meant the quasiparticles, aka. plasmons, that result from the excitation by light.

[Kyrillos]

Yeah, your right, I typed that up at 1:00AM in a vigourous intellectual frenzy >

No heed to the actual terminology I needed.