Plasmonic Bragg reflector and its application on optical switching

Abstract

In nowadays intergrated circuit design, the diffraction limit has restricted the downscaling of the conventional electronic components. Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPPs) are quantized charge density oscillations that occur at the interface between metal and dielectric materials when photons couple to the free electron gas of the metal. The extraordinary properties of SPPs can be utilized for sub-diffraction limit wave guiding and localized field enhancement. The resulting photonic components overcome the physics limitations of their electronic counterparts and offer a promising vista of the next generation all-optic circuits. Among all possible plasmonic-based configurations, those focus light into the dielectric core in a metal-insulator-metal(MIM) structure allow the manipulation and transmission of light at the nanoscale. Based on MIM structures, plasmonic Bragg reflectors reveal similar properties as the distributed Bragg reflectors. Therefore, plasmonic Bragg reflectors may also be used for effective optical switching, when the similar design for distributed Bragg reflectors is applied. In this thesis, the sawtooth plasmonic Bragg reflector and the nonlinear λ/4-shifted plasmonic Bragg reflector is proposed and studied. The obtained simulation results grant a better understanding of the characteristics of plasmonic Bragg reflectors and demonstrate their outstanding performance on optical switching.