The combined effect of side-coupled gain cavity and lossy cavity on the plasmonic response of metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waveguide is investigated theoretically using Green's function method. Our result suggests that the gain and loss parameters influence the amplitude and phase of the fields localized in the two cavities. For the case of balanced gain and loss, the fields of the two cavities are always of equi-amplitude but out of phase. A plasmon induced transparency (PIT)-like transmission peak can be achieved by the destructive interference of two fields with anti-phase. For the case of unbalanced gain and loss, some unexpected responses of structure are generated. When the gain is more than the loss, the system response is dissipative at around the resonant frequency of the two cavities, where the sum of reflectance and transmittance becomes less than one. This is because the lossy cavity, with a stronger localized field, makes the main contribution to the system response. When the gain is less than the loss, the reverse is true. It is found that the metal loss dissipates the system energy but facilitates the gain cavity to make a dominant effect on the system response. This mechanism may have a potential application for optical amplification and for a plasmonic waveguide switch.

The Green's function method is extended to deal with the propagation problem of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) waveguide network, which is a new application area involving discontinuous impedance and complex architecture. By employing the Green's function method, the spatial distributions of the magnitude and phase of field in the network waveguide are obtained analytically. The agreement with the numerical simulations confirms that this approach can completely describe the transmission properties of SPP in MDM waveguide and readily apply to the network structure, thus it can serve as an easy-performance analytic approach for a deeper understanding and further application of the SPP waveguide network.

Plasmonic lithography based on surface plasmon polariton has been proven to breaking the diffraction limit and deliver the super-resolution patterns. However, most previously reported studies suffer from the low energy efficiency and subwavelength excitation grating that obstructs the application in nanofabrication. In this work, a special plasmonic lithography prototype is proposed based on the coupling of the bulk plasmon polariton mode squeezed through the hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) and the waveguide mode supported in the coupling layer/HMM/photoresist sandwich structure. The results demonstrate that periodic patterns with strong lithography light intensity (>220%) over the whole photoresist layer compared with incident optical intensity, high aspect ratios (1.5:1) and a half-pitch of 57.5 nm can be generated, under the interference of the fourth-order diffracted light of grating. The lithography linewidth can reach 1/16 of the mask period of 920 nm and ~1/8 of the wavelength of the 436 nm illumination light. This design of period reduction makes the device fabrication much easier, costless and even exhibits good tolerance to the roughness of the multilayer. In addition, theoretical analyses performed are widely applicable to systems working at other ultraviolet wavelengths including 248, 365 and 405 nm.

The coexistence behavior of surface magnetoplasmons (SMPs) and bulk magnetoplasmons (BMPs) is discussed on a platform constructed by the Semicondutor-Insulator-Semiconductor (SIS) waveguide with the Voigt configuration magnetization. It is found that the coexistence of SMPs and BMPs stems from the nonzero off-diagonal terms of permittivity tensors of the top and the bottom semiconductor materials (SM) claddings which are induced by the external magnetic field. In this case, the impendence of SM for SMPs contains two contributions associated with both the transversal and the longitudinal wave vectors of SMPs. When the impendence matching condition of SMPs exciting in SIS waveguide is satisfied in the propagating band of BMPs, the coexistence of these two modes thus appears. The results show that the forwardpropagating SMPs only coexists with the lower BMPs mode, however, the backward-propagating SMPs coexists with the higher BMPs mode when the top and the bottom SM claddings are magnetized by equal amplitude magnetic field but with opposite direction. In addition, the influences of external-magnetic-field intensity, insulator permittivity and waveguide width on the coexisting frequency widths are also presented.