Optical bistability enhanced by highly localized bulk plasmon polariton modes in subwavelength metal-nonlinear dielectric multilayer structure

Abstract

Optical bistability of subwavelength metal-nonlinear dielectric multilayer structure is numerically studied in this letter. It is found that very low intensity thresholds for optical bistability can be achieved due to the excitation of highly localized bulk plasmon polariton modes with TM polarized illumination. A bistability threshold of 6.9 MW/cm2 is obtained for BPP0 mode, which is much lower than the recently reported results based on the large local field enhancement at the band edge of metal-dielectric photonic band gap structure [A. Husakou and J. Herrmann, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 127402 (2007)].