Plasmonic slot waveguides with core nonlinearity

Abstract

Metal-insulator-metal plasmonic waveguides (plasmonic slot waveguides, PSW) are known to offer high propagation lengths and confinement factors and have recently been gaining increasing attention in the literature. We analytically study the interplay between group velocity dispersion and self-phase modulation on ultrafast surface plasmon-polariton (SPP) pulse-reshaping for plasmonic-slot waveguides with nonlinear dielectric core. The analytic investigation of the role of the core nonlinearity on pulse propagation has, to our knowledge, not been investigated in the literature. We correlate our analytical results with numerical FDTD simulations.