Article Abstracts | June 2006
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Channeling Surface Plasmons
Subwavelength channels enable efficient lightguiding, suggesting the feasibility of ultracompact plasmonic components and a new class of integrated optical circuits.
by Dr. Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi, Aalborg Universitet
Modern communications systems must deal with huge amounts of data at ever-increasing speeds. In doing so, they try to use the best features of electronic and optical circuits. Electronic circuits are tiny, but their operation speed is limited. Optical circuits are much better at transmitting data at high speed, but their sizes are limited by diffraction — that is, propagating light cannot be squeezed in the lateral cross section below its wavelength in the medium.
Channel plasmons promise both the compactness of electronics and the speed of optics. Recent experiments have shown that channel plasmons propagate along the bottom of subwavelength grooves cut into a metal surface with strong confinement and low propagation loss, making them likely candidates for the realization of ultracompact photonic components...
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