Strong Coupling of Tamm Plasmons and Fabry-Perot Modes in a One-Dimensional Photonic Crystal Heterostructure

Abstract

The coupling between multiple modes in subwavelength scale has attracted a lot of attention due to the interesting physics favored by the enhancement of light-matter interaction. In this contribution, we propose a planar hybrid plasmonic-photonic crystal structure, which enables the tunable coupling between Tamm plasmon-polariton and Fabry-Perot cavity modes. Then, a strong coupling can be achieved through evoking the Tamm-mode dependence of the top-layer thickness of the hybrid structure, which is indicated by an anticrossing with a spectrum splitting of 9.298 meV. The effect enables the spatial confinement of polaritons and the formation of hybrid one-dimensional plasmon-polariton modes. In order to account for the splitting of the orthogonally polarized resonances, a detailed investigation on the TE-TM splitting is also performed through the angular-dependence analysis. We note that the value of the TE-TM splitting strongly depends on the thicknesses of dielectric layer and the distance between two distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) stacks. We show that the cavity modes are extremely sensitive to the distance between the DBR stacks and propose using this feature for strain sensing. Thus, our structure may not only offer a platform for study of interesting physics (e.g., spin optronics), but may also provide a route for high-accuracy strain sensors.