Design of plasmonic half-adder and half-subtractor circuits employing nonlinear effect in Mach–Zehnder interferometer

Abstract

Plasmonic metal---insulator---metal (MIM) waveguides have the unique attribute of propagating surface plasmons beyond the diffraction limit. In this paper, basic designs for half-adder and half-subtractor circuits are proposed based on the nonlinear effect in Mach---Zehnder interferometers designed using plasmonic MIM waveguides. The proposed devices are studied in the third optical communications window with transverse magnetic polarization. The designs are verified by the finite-difference time-domain technique with the help of MATLAB simulations.