Proposal for an Electrically Tunable Surface Plasmon Light Emitter

A new scheme is proposed to generate infrared waves by exciting thin-slab plasmon waves by hot-electron injection via a tunneling thin insulator. These plasmon waves are coupled out by a periodic structure, and, by way of example, this is demonstrated for a Karp structure. The calculated numerical values of the example at a wavelength of 15 -µm, show that standard semiconductor technology can be used to fabricate the device.