Our recent theoretical and experimental investigation of the photothermal effect in a planar metamaterial absorber is
reviewed in the present paper. The observed ultrasensitive photothermal heating in such an absorber nanostructure
irradiated by a pulsed white-light source is elaborated with a simple yet compelling heat transfer model, which is
subsequently solved with a finite-element method. The simulation results not only agree with the experimental finding,
but also provide more detailed understanding of the temperature transition in the complex system.
We experimentally demonstrate silver nanowire based plasmonic devices at optical communication wavelength 1.55 μm.
The plasmon propagation loss in a 300 nm diameter silver nanowire is measured to be 0.3 dB/μm. Two types of
plasmonic functional devices based on the coupling between two silver nanowires, nano-couplers and nano-splitters, are
realized.
We experimentally demonstrate an efficient coupler between a silicon waveguide and a hybrid
plasmonic waveguide for the wavelength range 1460-1540 nm. The coupling efficiency for a single
coupler is ~70% in the whole spectrum range which is consisted with the theoretical prediction. Such
compact, efficient plasmonic couplers provide a promising platform for integrated photonic circuits.
We study the importance of taking the nonlocal optical response of metals into account for accurate determination
of optical properties of nanoplasmonic structures. Here we focus on the computational physics aspects of this
problem, and in particular we report on the nonlocal-response package that we wrote for state-of the art numerical
software, enabling us to take into account the nonlocal material response of metals for any arbitrarily shaped
nanoplasmonic structures, without much numerical overhead as compared to the standard local response. Our
method is a frequency-domain method, and hence it is sensitive to possible narrow resonances that may arise
due to strong electronic quantum confinement in the metal. This feature allows us to accurately determine which
geometries are strongly affected by nonlocal response, for example regarding applications based on electric field
enhancement properties for which metal nanostructures are widely used.
Surface plasmon poalriton (SPP) waveguides have the potential to bring technology revolutions in fields like photonic
integration, optical sensing, and even deep sub-wavelength imaging. The peculiar guidance mechanism of such
waveguides however imposes great challenges on our existing theoretical modeling tools. In this paper, the superiority of
finite element method (FEM) is examined for deriving modes guided by realistic SPP waveguides. In consideration of
the anisotropic field profiles of most SPP waveguides, we propose the deployment of anisotropic finite element mesh.
The anisotropic finite mesh is found to be able to reduce the numerical problem size greatly. Among all SPP waveguides,
we emphasis the importance of the metal-corner waveguides, including both V-channel and Λ-wedge waveguides. Such
metal corners can be found in most SPP waveguides proposed or fabricated so far. The properties like dispersion and
propagation loss etc are studied by using FEM. Subwavelength light guidance can be achieved by such corner
waveguides when their angles are kept small enough. However their applicability in nanoscaled optical circuits is
affected by high propagation loss. Loss reduction or introduction of metamaterial with gain is desired in order to obtain
small mode field size as well as low loss.
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