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Interband Plasmonics with p-block Elements

We investigate the origin of the near-ultraviolet visible plasmonic properties of three elemental materials from the p-block: Bi, Sb and Ga, with the aim to achieve and exploit unconventional plasmonic effects beyond those provided by noble metals. At such aim, we review and analyze a broad range of optically-determined dielectric functions e of these elemental materials available in the literature, covering a wide photon energy range (from 0.03 to 24 eV). It is shown that the contribution of Drude-like carriers to e1 (real part of e) in the near-ultraviolet visible is negligible for Bi and Sb and moderate for Ga. In contrast, the interband transitions of these elemental materials show a high oscillator strength that yields a strong negative contribution to e1 in the near-ultraviolet visible. Therefore in these materials interband transitions are not a mere damping channel detrimental to plasmonic properties. Remarkably, these interband transitions induce fully (partially) the localized surface plasmon-like resonances taking place in Bi and Sb (Ga) nanostructures in the near-ultraviolet visible. Plasmonic properties achieved through interband transitions, without Drude-like carrier excitation, are very attractive phenomena because they may give rise to a rich and broad class of nanostructures and metamaterials in which plasmonic effects will be tunable through the tailoring of band structure and by the occupancy of electronic states.