Abstract

The miniaturization of optical devices to the scale compatible with modern nanoelectronic circuits demands the ability to manipulate light at subwavelength scale. Plasmonics has been a rapidly emerging field which offers various means to manipulate light at the nanometer scale using surface plasmons (SPs). SPs can strongly confine electromagnetic fields near metal-dielectric interface to overcome the conventional diffraction limit of dielectric optics. Therefore, SP-based nanophotonic devices are promising to build densely on-chip integrated circuits for next generation information technology. Plasmonic waveguide is one of the key elements for the plasmonic circuits [1]. Chemically synthesized crystalline silver nanowires (Ag NWs) can support propagating SPs with lower losses than lithographically defined nanowire waveguides, and can be easily manipulated to construct complex optical devices, which make them ideal candidates for proof-of-principle studies for plasmonic circuits. To investigate the SP propagating properties in metal NWs, we recently developed the method using quantum dot fluorescence to image the local electric field distribution of propagating SPs along Ag NWs [2]. By using this method, we have shown that the near field distributions of propagating NW plasmons depend strongly on the polarization and phase of the input light which can be used to realize an entire family of optical Boolean logic gates in NW networks [2-4].

© 2013 Japan Society of Applied Physics, Optical Society of America