Electrostatically and Opticlly Gated Field Emission Transistors

Recently, several groups have demonstrated that plasmonically trapped light can optically stimulate ultra-fast field emission of electrons [1][2] by taking advantage of the sub-wavelength confinement of light at the metal/air interface to generate the intense electric fields needed to tunnel an electron into vacuum. Nanoscale field emission transistors produce the same magnitude fields electrostatically by applying modest voltages over nanoscale distances [3]. We have combined both principles and produced nanoscale field emission transistors integrated into hybrid plasmonic waveguides on a SOI platform. These devices can be optically or electrostatically gated and may serve as building blocks for ultra-fast opto-electronic circuits.

[1] Putnam, William P. et al. (2017). “Optical-field-controlled photoemission from plasmonic nanoparticles”. In: Nat Phys 13.4, pp. 335–339.
[2] Karnetzky, C., Zimmermann, P., Trummer, C., Sierra, C. D., Wörle, M., Kienberger, R., & Holleitner, A. (2018). Towards femtosecond on-chip electronics based on plasmonic hot electron nano-emitters. Nature Communications, 9(1), 2471.
[3] Jones, William M., Daniil Lukin, and Axel Scherer (2017). “Practical nanoscale field emission devices for integrated circuits”. In: Applied Physics Letters 110.26, p. 263101.