Simultaneous observation of the quantization and the…
★★★★½ 4.5 — Peer reviewed, Nature Communications
★★★★½ 4.5 / 5 — Peer reviewed, Nature Communications
Simultaneous observation of the quantization and the interference pattern of a plasmonic near-field
Luca Piazza et al. · 2015 · Nature Communications · article
Why this rating
- Evidence class: article (3.00)
- Cited 18.1x the average for its field and age (+0.50)
- Top 1% most-cited in its field (+1.00)
- Open access: the full text is checkable (+0.25)
The rubric starts from what kind of study this is and lets citation data adjust it, never the other way round. Five stars is reachable by a well-regarded evidence synthesis and not by a single paper, however famous. Scores round down.
How the field treats it
315 citations recorded.
Field-weighted citation impact: 18.10. This is the count normalised against papers of the same age in the same field, where 1.00 is exactly average — it is the number worth reading, because a raw count means something different in oncology than in topology.
In the top 1% most-cited work in its field.
What stands against it
No retraction, correction or expression of concern on record.
No published comment, reply or rebuttal naming it was found among the works that cite it.
Data-integrity concerns often surface first on PubPeer, which cannot be read automatically: see its discussion there.
Notices from Crossref, which carries the Retraction Watch database; replies from OpenAlex.
What it actually says
Surface plasmon polaritons can confine electromagnetic fields in subwavelength spaces and are of interest for photonics, optical data storage devices and biosensing applications. In analogy to photons, they exhibit wave-particle duality, whose different aspects have recently been observed in separate tailored experiments. Here we demonstrate the ability of ultrafast transmission electron microscopy to simultaneously image both the spatial interference and the quantization of such confined plasmonic fields. Our experiments are accomplished by spatiotemporally overlapping electron and light pulses on a single nanowire suspended on a graphene film. The resulting energy exchange between single electrons and the quanta of the photoinduced near-field is imaged synchronously with its spatial interference pattern. This methodology enables the control and visualization of plasmonic fields at the nanoscale, providing a promising tool for understanding the fundamental properties of confined electromagnetic fields and the development of advanced photonic circuits.
Read it
This rates the paper, not the claim. A strong paper can still be irrelevant to, or misquoted by, the post that cited it. The stars say how much weight the study can bear — not whether it says what someone claimed it says.
Rubric v1.0 · data from OpenAlex, retrieved 19 Oct 2026