Achievement

“Transparent Conductive Oxides: Plasmonic Materials for Telecom Wavelengths” We have shown that despite of low loss, silver and gold are not suitable for a variety of nanoplasmonic applications in the infrared range, which require compact modes in single-interface plasmonic waveguides. At the same time, we have demonstrated that degenerate wide-band-gap semiconductors can serve as high-quality plasmonic materials at telecom wavelengths, combining fairly high compactness and relatively low loss. We conclude that their plasmonic properties in the near-IR can be compared to those of gold in the visible range. The same materials can be used in a variety of non-plasmonic metamaterials applications, including transformation optics and invisibility cloaking. This work was present at the Metamaterials conference, Karsruhe, Germany, October 2010 and at the Frontiers in Optics conference, Rochester, NY, October 2010. The paper has been accepted for publication on Appl. Phys. Lett. in July 2011.