Plasmonics beyond noble metals: Exploiting phase and compositional changes for manipulating plasmonic performance

Reconfigurable plasmonics constitutes an exciting and challenging new horizon in nanophotonics. This blooming field aims at providing plasmonic nanostructures that present a dynamic and active plasmonic response that can be switched or manipulated by external stimuli to induce a controllable change in the optical properties. Most common plasmonic materials, such as the noble metals gold and silver, cannot deliver this type of behavior. Therefore, significant effort is being invested in developing alternative materials whose optical properties can be controllably modified to provide a reconfigurable plasmonic response. In this perspective, several materials including non-noble metals, transition metal oxides and nitrides, and chalcogenide compounds will be analyzed. The selected materials share interesting characteristics like low cost, good chemical and thermal stabilities, and CMOS compatibility while presenting a reconfigurable plasmonic response governed by different phase-change mechanisms.