Plasmon Wave Propagates for 80 µm with No Diffraction
The cosine-Gauss plasmon beam, caused by quasiparticles called surface plasmons, remains very narrow and controlled along an unprecedented distance, said a Harvard University-led American and French team. The surface plasmons travel in tight confinement with a nanostructured metal surface. The metallic stripes that carry these plasmons have the potential to replace standard copper electrical interconnects in microprocessors, enabling ultrafast on-chip communications.
“travels efficiently at the interface of gold and air” Copper connects are buried in a multi-plane chip (9 wiring layers in Intel Core i3 and i5 cpus) and under the chip’s surface that is glass-coated or otherwise passivated. Using optical needle length as scale, one does not see the construct competing with 32 nm-wide copper connects – by two orders of magnitude.