No Arabic abstract
Intense electromagnetic evanescent fields are thermally excited in near fields on material surfaces (at distances smaller than the wavelength of peak thermal radiation). The property of the fields is of strong interest for it is material-specific and is important for understanding a variety of surface-related effects, such as friction forces, Casimir forces, near-field heat transfer, and surface-coupled molecular dynamics. On metal surfaces, relevance of surface plasmon polaritons (SPlPs), coupled to collective motion of conduction electrons, has attracted strong interest, but has not been explicitly clarified up to the present time. Here, using a passive terahertz (THz) near-field microscope with unprecedented high sensitivity, we unveil detailed nature of thermally generated evanescent fields (wavelength:lamda0~14.5micron) on metals at room temperature. Our experimental results unambiguously indicate that the thermal waves are short-wavelength fluctuating electromagnetic fields, from which relevance of SPlPs is ruled out.
Superconducting quantum circuits are one of the leading quantum computing platforms. To advance superconducting quantum computing to a point of practical importance, it is critical to identify and address material imperfections that lead to decoherence. Here, we use terahertz Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy (SNOM) to probe the local dielectric properties and carrier concentrations of wet-etched aluminum resonators on silicon, one of the most characteristic components of the superconducting quantum processors. Using a recently developed vector calibration technique, we extract the THz permittivity from spectroscopy in proximity to the microwave feedline. Fitting the extracted permittivity to the Drude model, we find that silicon in the etched channel has a carrier concentration greater than buffer oxide etched silicon and we explore post-processing methods to reduce the carrier concentrations. Our results show that near-field THz investigations can be applied to quantitatively evaluate and identify potential loss channels in quantum devices.
Near-field optical microscopy by means of infrared photocurrent mapping has rapidly developed in recent years. In this letter we introduce a near-field induced contrast mechanism arising when a conducting surface, exhibiting a magnetic moment, is exposed to a nanoscale heat source. The magneto-caloritronic response of the sample to near-field excitation of a localized thermal gradient leads to a contrast determined by the local state of magnetization. By comparing the measured electric response of a magnetic reference sample with numerical simulations we derive an estimate of the field enhancement and the corresponding temperature profile induced on the sample surface.
Recently, the fundamental and nanoscale understanding of complex phenomena in materials research and the life sciences, witnessed considerable progress. However, elucidating the underlying mechanisms, governed by entangled degrees of freedom such as lattice, spin, orbit, and charge for solids or conformation, electric potentials, and ligands for proteins, has remained challenging. Techniques that allow for distinguishing between different contributions to these processes are hence urgently required. In this paper we demonstrate the application of scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) as a novel type of nano-probe for tracking transient states of matter. We introduce a sideband-demodulation technique that allows for probing exclusively the stimuli-induced change of near-field optical properties. We exemplify this development by inspecting the decay of an electron-hole plasma generated in SiGe thin films through near-infrared laser pulses. Our approach can universally be applied to optically track ultrafast/-slow processes over the whole spectral range from UV to THz frequencies.
We compare the behavior of propagating and evanescent light waves in absorbing media with that of electrons in the presence of inelastic scattering. The imaginary part of the dielectric constant results primarily in an exponential decay of a propagating wave, but a phase shift for an evanescent wave. We then describe how the scattering of quantum particles out of a particular coherent channel can be modeled by introducing an imaginary part to the potential in analogy with the optical case. The imaginary part of the potential causes additional scattering which can dominate and actually prevent absorption of the wave for large enough values of the imaginary part. We also discuss the problem of maximizing the absorption of a wave and point out that the existence of a bound state greatly aids absorption. We illustrate this point by considering the absorption of light at the surface of a metal.
We report on infrared (IR) nanoscopy of 2D plasmon excitations of Dirac fermions in graphene. This is achieved by confining mid-IR radiation at the apex of a nanoscale tip: an approach yielding two orders of magnitude increase in the value of in-plane component of incident wavevector q compared to free space propagation. At these high wavevectors, the Dirac plasmon is found to dramatically enhance the near-field interaction with mid-IR surface phonons of SiO2 substrate. Our data augmented by detailed modeling establish graphene as a new medium supporting plasmonic effects that can be controlled by gate voltage.