Plasmon-polariton band structures of asymmetric T-shaped plasmonic gratings

Abstract

It is shown that asymmetric T-shaped plasmonic gratings can display plasmon-polariton band structures with wide range of band gaps and tunable group velocities. A structure gap is introduced in the post of Tshaped plasmonic gratings and it is found that the size of this gap plays an important role in controlling the plasmon-polariton band gap and group velocities. We obtained variation of energy band gap ranging from 0.4 eV to 0.0323 eV by changing the size of the structure gap from 0 to 250 nm. The plasmon-polariton band structures were obtained by using Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis. We studied the difference between symmetric and asymmetric T-shaped gratings and found that the symmetric structure has a momentum gap in the photonic band structure, which can be avoided in the asymmetric structure. Furthermore, by varying the post and spacer (made of SiO2) thicknesses we can tune the energy band gap from 0.1 eV to 0.148 eV and from 0.183 eV to 0.19 eV, respectively. In this device, we obtain tunable group velocities ranging from one to several orders of magnitude smaller than the speed of light in the vacuum. This asymmetric T-shaped plasmonic grating is expected to have applications in surface plasmon polariton (SPP) based optical devices, such as filters, waveguides, splitters and lasers, especially for applications requiring large photonic band gap.