In the presence of matter, there is no fundamental limit preventing confinement of visible light even down to atomic scales. Achieving such confinement and the corresponding resonant intensity enhancement inevitably requires simultaneous control over atomic-scale details of material structures and over the optical modes that such structures support. By means of self-assembly we have obtained side-by-side aligned gold nanorod dimers with robust atomically defined gaps reaching below 0.5 nm. The existence of atomically confined light fields in these gaps is demonstrated by observing extreme Coulomb splitting of corresponding symmetric and antisymmetric dimer eigenmodes of more than 800 meV in white-light scattering experiments. Our results open new perspectives for atomically resolved spectroscopic imaging, deeply nonlinear optics, ultrasensing, cavity optomechanics, as well as for the realization of novel quantum-optical devices.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 29. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 03 October 2017.
All research outputs
#1,579,499
of 31,266,886 outputs
Outputs from Nano Letters
#1,037
of 15,972 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#8,603
of 210,845 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Nano Letters
#6
of 142 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 31,266,886 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 94th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 15,972 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.4. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 210,845 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 142 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its contemporaries.
