Switching of Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Using A Phase-Change Material and Applications to Intelligent Computing

Abstract

We investigated the modulation of the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) of a gold nanoparticle (AuNP) using a GeSbTe (GST) film as an active medium. We demonstrate high-contrast switching of LSPR in an AuNP/GST and an AuNP/GST/Au nanosandwich structure upon phase change. To go beyond this single-particle switching functionality, we consider the plasmon particle system interacting with a phase change material (PCM) to discuss the possibility of parallel processing devices with memory functionality, making use of the plasticity and threshold behavior, which is inherently involved in PCMs. We demonstrate that temporal and spatial evolution of a plasmon-PCM array system can be equivalent to a cellular automata algorithm.