Plasmonic solitons and dromions via plasmon-induced transparency

Abstract

We propose a method to enhance Kerr nonlinearities and realize low-power gigahertz solitons via plasmon induced transparency (PIT) in a new type of metamaterial, which is constructed by an array of unit cell consisting of a cut-wire and a pair of varactor- loaded split-ring resonators. We show that the PIT in such metamaterial can not only mimic the electromagnetically induced transparency in coherent three-level atomic systems, but also exhibit a crossover from PIT to Autler-Townes splitting. We further show that the system suggested here also possess giant second- and third-order nonlinear optical susceptibilities, which may be used to create plasmon solitons and dromions with extremely low power. Our studies raise the possibility for obtaining strong nonlinear effects of gigahertz radiation at very low intensity based on room temperature metamaterials.