Abstract
A metal insulator metal (MIM) waveguide structure which propagates a strongly
confined sub-wavelength plasmon mode is proposed. In particular the structure permits
electrical pumping of the waveguide core. The waveguide can in principle be fabricated
with thin cores down to a few tens of nano meters wide. When quantum well material is
employed, the waveguide core can be formed with self aligned quantum wire or quantum dot
gain material. The performance of the proposed structure is compared to other plasmon
mode and dielectric waveguide structures, and shown to provide significantly improved
confinement of energy in the high index waveguide core. The implications of such
waveguides when used as electrically pumped waveguides for optical amplifiers and
nano-lasers is examined. It is shown that these electrically pumped waveguide structures
offer the possibility of net modal gains in the region of 1900 cm-1, and
nano-lasers with intrinsic optical modulation frequencies reaching into the THz regime
with minimum pump currents on the order of sixty micro-amps.
© 2013 IEEE
PDF Article
More Like This
Lasing in metal-insulator-metal sub-wavelength plasmonic waveguides
Martin T. Hill, Milan Marell, Eunice S. P. Leong, Barry Smalbrugge, Youcai Zhu, Minghua Sun, Peter J. van Veldhoven, Erik Jan Geluk, Fouad Karouta, Yok-Siang Oei, Richard Nötzel, Cun-Zheng Ning, and Meint K. Smit
Opt. Express 17(13) 11107-11112 (2009)
Cited By
You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.
Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription