Principle and Applications of the Coupling of Surface Plasmons and Excitons

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors provide an extensive overview of various coupling principles and methods between surface plasmons and excitons. After a brief summary of the historical development of fundamental principles, the authors highlighted several novel configurations developed more recently including nanogaps, graphene, metallic nanoparticles, periodic gratins among others. Overall, the authors have provided a great summary of extended contents and the manuscript reads well fluently. Compared with the extensive coverages, the choice of references could be much improved.

First, there are excellent review papers published over the last decade that provided great reviews in different aspects of each coupling principle, especially in nanogaps, nanoparticles, and periodic gratings with their applications. Providing a brief summary of how these nanostructures are being used in real applications with those distinctive review papers would be appreciated by a broad range of readers. 

Second, I found 10 or more references from the authors. I understand a few can be included, but this is a big portion of self-citation. Please select a few essential and also include other excellent review papers in the field. 

Third, I suggest the authors provide a summary table discussing and comparing different coupling principles with their applications. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This review concerns the coupling of surface plasmons and excitons. The authors need to revise the paper with respect to the comments.

1.
The authors need to describe the reason for doing this review in more detail in introduction.

2.
The authors described common excitation modes at lines 5-6 on page 3. If the authors have references about these, the authors need to add them in references.

3.
The authors mentioned the loss of SPPs at line 2 on page 19, the authors should add a brief explanation about the loss of SPPs in chapter 2.

4.
The author mentioned new series of energy conversion processes such as photon-thermal-electricity and photon-electricity-thermal at line 5 on page 19. The authors should add any explanations and references to this in references.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I reviewed the article by He and colleagues about reviewing the experiments concerning the coupling between surface plasmons and excitons.

I find the idea and the development of the work potentially interesting for the community, in which such a kind of paper seems to lack as far as I know. However, the task the authors chose is challenging in terms of a fair coverage of at least the most relevant works in the field, and in my opinion they miss it. The very first years of experiments are fairly covered, but if we consider, for example, the last part about the coupling with TMD excitons, they report results of the last couple of years mainly, forgetting the very first experiments performed by the group of Agarwal (Pennsilvanya University) and Ebbesen (Strasbourg University), respectively:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b04588

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b01475

and also coupling experiments involving spin-orbit interactions, which represent an important new research ground of the field. Among them , the following are the two pioneering works:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6374/443.abstract

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsphotonics.7b01032

Furthermore, the discussion is only words-driven, without a single relation justifying the involved physics and thus allowing the reader to follow. In my opinion, this is necessary in order for the work to be considered for publication. To give a few examples:

SPP dispersion relation, strong coupling conditions and relations, momentum matching conditions, etc

Fundamental relations and more applied ones have to be considered here, in my opinion.

References should also be properly done, indicating either the first or last author name, the important is that it should always be the same way. The English needs also an improvement.

In conclusion, in my opinion, the manuscript cannot be published as it is, but it needs major revision and being reconsidered afterwards. Despite that, the initiated work is interesting and I encourage the authors to work more for improving it.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx