Cathodoluminescence of Surface Plasmon Induced Light Emission

Cathodoluminescence (CL) is light emitting phenomena induced by high energy electrons incident on materials. The CL is sometimes defined as light emission caused by the inner electronic transition between the electronic states or bands associated with excitation by the incident electron beam. The typical one is the radiative recombination of carriers in semiconductors, such as the band to band transition (Yamamoto, 2010). CL measurement has been performed by combining a light detection system with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) or scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), in which a focused electron beam is scanned over a specimen and simultaneously a scanning image is recoarded by using an emitted light signal. This technique is called cathodoluminescence. This technique provides us the information of local electronic states from the CL spectrum, and spatial distribution of luminescence centers from the CL image, and thus has been applied to the characterization of structural defects such as dislocations and semiconductor quantum structures. On the other hand there are other types of light emission caused by a high-energy electron passing through or nearby a medium (Yamamoto et al., 1996, 2001a), such as Cherenkov radiation, transition radiation and Smith-Purcell radiation. A highenergy electron incident on a metal surface can excite a surface plasmon which propagates on a corrugated metal surface to emit light. Recently such light emission induced by surface plasmon has been intensively studied by the CL technique.