Active plasmonics in WDM traffic switching applications

Abstract

With metal stripes being intrinsic components of plasmonic waveguides, plasmonics provides a “naturally” energy-efficient platform for merging broadband optical links with intelligent electronic processing, instigating a great promise for low-power and small-footprint active functional circuitry. The first active Dielectric-Loaded Surface Plasmon Polariton (DLSPP) thermo-optic (TO) switches with successful performance in single-channel 10 Gb/s data traffic environments have led the inroad towards bringing low-power active plasmonics in practical traffic applications. In this article, we introduce active plasmonics into Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) switching applications, using the smallest TO DLSPP-based Mach-Zehnder interferometric switch reported so far and showing its successful performance in 4×10 Gb/s low-power and fast switching operation. The demonstration of the WDM-enabling characteristics of active plasmonic circuits with an ultra-low power × response time product represents a crucial milestone in the development of active plasmonics towards real telecom and datacom applications, where low-energy and fast TO operation with small-size circuitry is targeted.

All-optical switching in silicon photonic waveguides with an epsilon-near-zero resonant cavity [Invited]

“…The strong nonlinear optical response of the optimized ENZ cavity allows all-optical switching and enables integrated nanoscale switches and modulators in Si waveguides. A similar approach can be used for integrated thermo-optical modulators [37] using the control of the lattice temperature of metal. …”

Plasmonic circuits for manipulating optical information

“…Variants of this method use electrical signals to induce temperature changes that modify the refractive index of a thermo-optic dielectric, again by using interferometry to alter the plasmon intensity [147] or by using electrochemical switching of material properties [148,149].…”

Plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) modulators for OOK and BPSK signaling at 40 Gbit/s

“…Furthermore, both for ring resonators and photonic crystal modulators, the optical bandwidth is inherently limited by the resonant nature of the device. These limitations can be overcome by plasmonic integration, which enables compact modulators without the need of making the devices resonant [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”