Highly Thermal Tunable Propagating Surface Plasmons on Supported Semiconductor Nanowire Metamaterial

It is generally known for metal nanoparticles and metal surfaces that surface plasmons, or the quanta of the collective oscillations of free electrons at a metal surface, are readily tunable, but less is known about semiconductor nanowires. Here, we find that surface plasmons on semiconductor nanowires have a very significant tunability that can be controlled by varying the temperature and, therefore, the semiconductor characteristics. Such high sensitivity could lead to the creation of on-chip ultrasensitive biosensing and is essential for directly controlling the optical signal dispersion for different routing and demultiplexing tasks in plasmonic circuits.