  The strength of light emission near metallic nanostructures can scale
anomalously with frequency and dimensionality. We find that light-matter
interactions in plasmonic systems confined in two dimensions (e.g., near metal
nanowires) strengthen with decreasing frequency owing to strong mode
confinement away from the surface plasmon frequency. The anomalous scaling also
applies to the modulation speed of plasmonic light sources, including lasers,
with modulation bandwidths growing at lower carrier frequencies. This allows
developing optical devices that exhibit simultaneously femto-second response
times at the nano-meter scale, even at longer wavelengths into the mid IR,
limited only by non-local effects and reversible light-matter coupling.
