The company Menlo Systems has a collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) for their ongoing research into the control of ultrafast dynamics in solid state systems. The group of Hou-Tong Chen, located at LANL in New Mexico, has developed a new way to control and shape charge currents on the nanoscale. The team developed sub-wavelength-scale gold resonator antennas – nanoantennas – which were excited by pulsed near-infrared light to enable control of the direction, amplitude, and location of nanoscale charge currents in a monoatomic layer of graphene.

The process harnesses symmetry breaking of the structures, as well as the photo­thermoelectric dynamics of graphene to provide easier control over vectorial currents, with response times of less than a picosecond. Menlo Systems’ development team contributed by developing a terahertz imaging method to extract hyper­spectral imaging data of the vector fields, using our industry-proven TeraSmart terahertz spectro­meter, together with the new ELMO 780 XHP femto­second fiber laser and state-of-the-art TERA15-RX-FC terahertz antennas.

This technique is not limited by material properties or dynamics, as is the case for conventional electronic circuits, bringing enormous potential in emerging science and technology. These new capa­bilities could radically improve appli­cations including nano­magnetism, ultrahigh-speed wireless communi­cations, materials characterization, as well as for the generation of terahertz radiation. (Source: Menlo Systems)

Reference: J. Pettine et al.: Light-driven nanoscale vectorial currents, Nature 626, 984 (2024); DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07037-4

Link: Menlo Systems, Martinsried, Germany • Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, USA