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Plexciton
Plexcitons are polaritonic modes that result from coherently coupled plasmons and exciton An exciton is a bound state of an electron and an electron hole which are attracted to each other by the electrostatic Coulomb force. It is an electrically neutral quasiparticle that exists in insulators, semiconductors and some liquids. The ...s. Plexcitons aid direct energy flows in exciton energy transfer (EET). Plexcitons travel for 20 μm, similar to the width of a human hair. History Plasmons are a quantity of collective electron oscillations. Excitons are excited electrons bound to the hole produced by their excitation. Molecular crystal excitons were combined with the collective excitations within metals to create plexcitons. This allowed EET to reach distances of around 20,000 nanometers, an enormous increase over the some 10 nanometers possible previously. However, the transfer direction was uncontrolled. Topological insulators (TI) act as insulators below their surf ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polariton
In physics, polaritons are quasiparticles resulting from strong coupling of electromagnetic waves with an electric or magnetic dipole-carrying excitation. They are an expression of the common quantum phenomenon known as level repulsion, also known as the avoided crossing principle. Polaritons describe the crossing of the dispersion of light with any interacting resonance. To this extent polaritons can also be thought of as the new normal modes of a given material or structure arising from the strong coupling of the bare modes, which are the photon and the dipolar oscillation. The polariton is a bosonic quasiparticle, and should not be confused with the polaron (a fermionic quasiparticle), which is an electron plus an attached phonon cloud. Whenever the polariton picture is valid (i.e., when the weak coupling limit is an invalid approximation), the model of photons propagating freely in crystals is insufficient. A major feature of polaritons is a strong dependency of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plasmon
In physics, a plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Just as light (an optical oscillation) consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons. The plasmon can be considered as a quasiparticle since it arises from the quantization of plasma oscillations, just like phonons are quantizations of mechanical vibrations. Thus, plasmons are collective (a discrete number) oscillations of the free electron gas density. For example, at optical frequencies, plasmons can couple with a photon to create another quasiparticle called a plasmon polariton. Derivation The plasmon was initially proposed in 1952 by David Pines and David Bohm and was shown to arise from a Hamiltonian for the long-range electron-electron correlations. Since plasmons are the quantization of classical plasma oscillations, most of their properties can be derived directly from Maxwell's equations. Explanation Plasmons can be described in the classical picture as an oscillation of elect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exciton
An exciton is a bound state of an electron and an electron hole which are attracted to each other by the electrostatic Coulomb force. It is an electrically neutral quasiparticle that exists in insulators, semiconductors and some liquids. The exciton is regarded as an elementary excitation of condensed matter that can transport energy without transporting net electric charge. An exciton can form when a material absorbs a photon of higher energy than its bandgap. This excites an electron from the valence band into the conduction band. In turn, this leaves behind a positively charged electron hole (an abstraction for the location from which an electron was moved). The electron in the conduction band is then less attracted to this localized hole due to the repulsive Coulomb forces from large numbers of electrons surrounding the hole and excited electron. These repulsive forces provide a stabilizing energy balance. Consequently, the exciton has slightly less energy than the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Topological Insulators
A topological insulator is a material whose interior behaves as an electrical insulator while its surface behaves as an electrical conductor, meaning that electrons can only move along the surface of the material. A topological insulator is an insulator for the same reason a " trivial" (ordinary) insulator is: there exists an energy gap between the valence and conduction bands of the material. But in a topological insulator, these bands are, in an informal sense, "twisted", relative to a trivial insulator. The topological insulator cannot be continuously transformed into a trivial one without untwisting the bands, which closes the band gap and creates a conducting state. Thus, due to the continuity of the underlying field, the border of a topological insulator with a trivial insulator (including vacuum, which is topologically trivial) is forced to support a conducting state. Since this results from a global property of the topological insulator's band structure, local (symmetr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electrons
The electron (, or in nuclear reactions) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no known components or substructure. The electron's mass is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton. Quantum mechanical properties of the electron include an intrinsic angular momentum ( spin) of a half-integer value, expressed in units of the reduced Planck constant, . Being fermions, no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state, per the Pauli exclusion principle. Like all elementary particles, electrons exhibit properties of both particles and waves: They can collide with other particles and can be diffracted like light. The wave properties of electrons are easier to observe with experiments than those of other particles like neutrons and protons because electrons have a lower mass and hence a longer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dirac Cone
Dirac cones, named after Paul Dirac, are features that occur in some electronic band structures that describe unusual electron transport properties of materials like graphene and topological insulators. In these materials, at energies near the Fermi level, the valence band and conduction band take the shape of the upper and lower halves of a conical surface, meeting at what are called Dirac points. Description In quantum mechanics, Dirac cones are a kind of crossing-point which electrons avoid, where the energy of the valence and conduction bands are not equal anywhere in two dimensional lattice -space, except at the zero dimensional Dirac points. As a result of the cones, electrical conduction can be described by the movement of charge carriers which are massless fermions, a situation which is handled theoretically by the relativistic Dirac equation. The massless fermions lead to various quantum Hall effects, magnetoelectric effects in topological materials, and ultr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quasiparticles
In physics, quasiparticles and collective excitations are closely related emergent phenomena arising when a microscopically complicated system such as a solid behaves as if it contained different weakly interacting particles in vacuum. For example, as an electron travels through a semiconductor, its motion is disturbed in a complex way by its interactions with other electrons and with atomic nuclei. The electron behaves as though it has a different effective mass travelling unperturbed in vacuum. Such an electron is called an ''electron quasiparticle''. In another example, the aggregate motion of electrons in the valence band of a semiconductor or a hole band in a metal behave as though the material instead contained positively charged quasiparticles called '' electron holes''. Other quasiparticles or collective excitations include the '' phonon'', a quasiparticle derived from the vibrations of atoms in a solid, and the '' plasmons'', a particle derived from plasma oscill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
