Authors: Alessandro Salandrino Yuan Wang Xiang Zhang
Publish Date: 2016/01/09
Volume: 9, Issue: 1, Pages: 224-229
Abstract
The large negative permittivity of noble metals in the infrared region prevents the possibility of highly confined plasmons in simple waveguide structures such as thin films or rods This is a critical obstacle to applications of nonlinear plasmonics in the telecommunication wavelength region We theoretically propose and numerically demonstrate that such limitation can be overcome by exploiting interelement coupling effects in a plasmonic waveguide array The supermodes of a plasmonic array span a large range of effective indices making these structures ideal for broadband modemultiplexed interconnects for integrated photonic devices We show such plasmonic waveguide arrays can significantly enhance nonlinear optical interactions when operating in a highindex tightly bound supermode For example a thirdorder nonlinear coefficient in such a waveguide can be more than three orders of magnitude larger compared to silicon waveguides of similar dimensions These findings open new design possibilities towards the application of plasmonics in integrated optical devices in the telecommunications spectral region
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