Optical bistability in metal-insulator-metal plasmonic Bragg waveguides with Kerr nonlinear defects

Hua Lu; Xueming Liu; Yongkang Gong; Dong Mao; Leiran Wang

doi:10.1364/AO.50.001307

Optical bistability in metal-insulator-metal plasmonic Bragg waveguides with Kerr nonlinear defects

Appl Opt. 2011 Apr 1;50(10):1307-11. doi: 10.1364/AO.50.001307.

Authors

Hua Lu¹, Xueming Liu, Yongkang Gong, Dong Mao, Leiran Wang

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an 710119, China.

PMID: 21460893
DOI: 10.1364/AO.50.001307

Abstract

We numerically investigate the characteristics of the defect mode and the nonlinear effect of optical bistability in metal-insulator-metal (MIM) plasmonic Bragg grating waveguides with Kerr nonlinear defects. By means of finite-difference time-domain simulations, we find that the defect mode peak exhibits a blueshift and height-rise by enlarging the width of the defect layer, and it has a redshift and height-fall with the increase of the dielectric constant of defect layer. Obvious optical bistability is obtained in our waveguides with a length of less than 2 μm. The results show that our structure could be applied to the design of all-optical switching in highly integrated optical circuits.