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Transmission and routing through plasmonic eigenstates

Published in ACS Photonics

par PREVOTS Evelyne, PREVOTS Evelyne - publié le , mis à jour le

Ultracompact plasmonic devices ensuring optical routing from one chosen entry port to one determined output port are designed from 2D gold crystals. The nonlinear information is transmitted by delocalized cavity modes over > 2 microns and is commuted by 20 dB upon turning the incident polarization. This collaborative work (CEMES, ICB Dijon, ETH Zürich) within the ANR project PlaCoRe opens a way to new electrooptical information processing architectures.

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Le façonnage de modes plasmoniques dans des cavités en forme de diabolo de cristaux 2D d’or permet le routage modal d’un signal non-linéaire depuis un port d’entrée vers un port de sortie choisis mais aussi la modulation de la puissance transmise en fonction de la polarisation incidente.
© CEMES-CNRS

Fast information processing technologies currently exploit all-optical and optoelectronic signal transmission and routing (i.e. selection of a specific signal pathway). At the nanoscale, circuitry based on conversion of photons into surface plasmons (collective oscillations of electrons) offers very promising solutions, yet transmission using propagating plasmons along narrow waveguides often results in signal loss.

Researchers in CEMES, in collaboration with colleagues from the ICB lab in Dijon (France) and from ETH Zürich (Switzerland), have conceived, carved and tested ultrathin and compact devices out of 2D gold crystals which are able to transmit nonlinear plasmo-optical signal from one precise input location to a determined and localized output port from which the signal can be collected. To create the efficient multi input/output signal transmission and routing device, the shape and optical response of 2D mesoscale gold resonators are engineered to sustain plasmon resonances exhibiting a complex plasmonic modal landscape with both delocalized extension and strong spatial modulation.

 

The experimental results are confirmed numerically using a dedicated near-field SP transmittance code with a realistic polarized Gaussian excitation. This modal design approach contributes to the emerging strategies to embed active information processing functions into pure or hybrid plasmonic structures. This work demonstrates the potential of modal engineering in pure plasmonic systems toward information processing, which could be used to create new computing architectures for classical and quantum optical technology.

This work was funded as part of the ANR project PlaCoRe (ANR-13-BS10-0007)

 

Reference

"Designing Plasmonic Eigenstates for Optical Signal Transmission in Planar Channel Devices" U. Kumar, S. Viarbitskaya, A. Cuche, C. Girard, S. Bolisetty, R. Mezzenga, G. Colas des Francs, A. Bouhelier and E. Dujardin. ACS Photonics 2018, 5, 2328-2335. DOI 10.1021/acsphotonics.8b00137

 

Contact

Dr. Erik Dujardin, CEMES (CNRS)
Erik.Dujardin chez cemes.fr