Utilization of Field Enhancement in Plasmonic Waveguides for Subwavelength Light-Guiding, Polarization Handling, Heating, and Optical Sensing

Materials

Daoxin Dai²  Hao Wu²  Wei Zhang¹ 

[1] Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing 400714, ChinaCentre for Optical and Electromagnetic Research, State Key Laboratory for Modern Optical Instrumentation, East Building No. 5, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China;

关键词: plasmonic nanostructures;    waveguide;    polarization-handling;    heating;    sensing;    silicon hybrid plasmonics;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ma8105341

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Plasmonic nanostructures have attracted intensive attention for many applications in recent years because of the field enhancement at the metal/dielectric interface. First, this strong field enhancement makes it possible to break the diffraction limit and enable subwavelength optical waveguiding, which is desired for nanophotonic integrated circuits with ultra-high integration density. Second, the field enhancement in plasmonic nanostructures occurs only for the polarization mode whose electric field is perpendicular to the metal/dielectric interface, and thus the strong birefringence is beneficial for realizing ultra-small polarization-sensitive/selective devices, including polarization beam splitters, and polarizers. Third, plasmonic nanostructures provide an excellent platform of merging electronics and photonics for some applications, e.g., thermal tuning, photo-thermal detection, etc. Finally, the field enhancement at the metal/dielectric interface helps a lot to realize optical sensors with high sensitivity when introducing plasmonic nanostrutures. In this paper, we give a review for recent progresses on the utilization of field enhancement in plasmonic nanostructures for these applications, e.g., waveguiding, polarization handling, heating, as well as optical sensing.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.