Faculty Publications

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https://hdl.handle.net/1911/75173
This collection includes faculty journal articles deposited per Rice's Open Access Policy and additional faculty work. Items found in this collection can also be found in the authors' departmental faculty publication collections.

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Browsing Faculty Publications by Author "Abbasi, Mahdiyeh"

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    Tuning Light Emission Crossovers in Atomic-Scale Aluminum Plasmonic Tunnel Junctions
    (American Chemical Society, 2022) Zhu, Yunxuan; Cui, Longji; Abbasi, Mahdiyeh; Natelson, Douglas
    Atomic-sized plasmonic tunnel junctions are of fundamental interest, with great promise as the smallest on-chip light sources in various optoelectronic applications. Several mechanisms of light emission in electrically driven plasmonic tunnel junctions have been proposed, from single-electron or higher-order multielectron inelastic tunneling to recombination from a steady-state population of hot carriers. By progressively altering the tunneling conductance of an aluminum junction, we tune the dominant light emission mechanism through these possibilities for the first time, finding quantitative agreement with theory in each regime. Improved plasmonic resonances in the energy range of interest increase photon yields by 2 orders of magnitude. These results demonstrate that the dominant emission mechanism is set by a combination of tunneling rate, hot carrier relaxation time scales, and junction plasmonic properties.