Plasmonic all-optical switching based on metamaterial/metal waveguides with local nonlinearity

Abstract

We present a plasmonic all-optical switch based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with local nonlinearity. The design of the miniaturized all-optical switch is possible by employing surface-plasmon polaritons (SPPs) that confine the energy of electromagnetic (EM) waves at sub-wavelength scale. The coupling between sub-wavelength plasmonic waveguides in MZI and a control beam generates 'ON' and 'OFF' states at the switch and switching between 'ON' and 'OFF' states happens when the control beam is turned on or off. The waveguides cladding in the switch structure is made of lossy media including metamaterials with positive and negative EM susceptibilities and metals; the core consists of nonlinear and dielectric media. Employing materials with negative EM susceptibilities in the switch structure facilitates the propagation of both transverse electric and transverse magnetic SPPs along the waveguides. Our all-optical switch design enables multi-frequency switching with low-intensity control field. Ascertaining the capabilities of multi-frequency plasmonic all-optical switches facilities their applications in miniaturized photonic circuits and in biosensors.

All-Optical Tunable Plasmonic Biosensor Made of Graphene and Metamaterial

“…We also employ noble metal Ag as a dispersive media in the waveguide structure. The metal parameters are F e = 1 and ω 0e = 0 [16]. The graphene-based plasmonic biosensor consists of a monolayer of graphene in the metal-dielectric waveguides core-cladding boundary.…”

“…For the Ag metal employed in this paper, the frequency range of negative permittivity is ω = 0.01ω e to 1ω e and magnetic permeability is constant (µ = 1). For this metal-dielectric structure, TM SPP propagates along the waveguides from 0.01ω e to 0.05ω e [16], therefore, we focus on this frequency range.…”

“…Metamaterial with negative permittivity and positive permeability supports TM SPPs along the structure [7]. For Fishnet metamaterials with the structural parameters specified in Sec.3, TM SPPs propagate from 0.045ω e to 0.054ω e [16]. Therefore, we focus on this frequency range to analyze the sensitivity of the biosensor.…”

“…The reason for employing different media in the biosensor structure is to analyzed the impact of media with different EM susceptibilities on the biosensor performance and its sensitivity. We employ metal with frequency-dependent permittivity and constant permeability, metamaterial with positive and negative EM susceptibilities [16], and graphene as a dispersive media in the waveguide's cladding.…”

High performance integrated photonic circuit based on inverse design method

“…Integrated photonic circuits and chips based on non-von Neumann architecture 4−6 are difficult to meet the requirements of small size and high-density integration. Traditional photonic integrated circuits based on von-Neumann-like architecture 7,8 are designed primarily us-ing regular and periodic structures, such as micro-ring resonant 9,10 , photonic crystal (PC) 11,12 , surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) 13,14 , metamaterial 15,16 , etc. Such dielectric structures usually need a large size, causing the overall size of the circuit large, usually reach hundreds of microns.…”