O. Lozan, M. Perrin, B. Ea-Kim, J. M. Rampnoux, S. Dilhaire, and P. Lalanne

Lozan et al. study the heat dissipated near a subwavelength aperture on a gold surface. Contrary to the common belief that the intensity of light created by local sources exponentially decays with distance from the source, they show that the heat dissipated at the surface exhibits a constant plateau over a large spatial interval that can be as high as seventy wavelengths. This property has very important implications in plasmonics as it may offer an alternative to amplification for compensating losses in plasmonic devices.

Journal Name: 
Physical Review Letters
Year of Publication: 
2014