Optical bistability effect in SPP-based metallic grating containing Kerr nonlinear medium

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the characteristics of the resonant modes and the optical bistability (OB) effect in the proposed metal–insulator–metal plasmonic structure containing Kerr nonlinear medium. By using finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, it is found that the plasmon resonance modes can be modulated with the change of the height of metallic grating, the thickness of Kerr material layer and refractive index. We also study the characteristic of OB with the correspondingly detuning parameters. The designed plasmonic structure can be potentially applied to projecting SPP-based nonlinear optical devices in integrated optical circuits.