Actively tunable photonic crystal-based switch via plasmon-analog of index enhancement

Abstract

We propose a miniaturized photonic switch, which utilizes (recently discovered) plasmon analog of index enhancement. An index is tuned via a control (auxiliary) pulse. The operation principle of the proposed device, composed of a few layers of nanorod dimers, is different than the conventional photonic switches. In the proposed device, a stop band is created at the desired frequency determined by the control pulse frequency. Calculated modulation depths are quite large, and response time is determined by the plasmon lifetime. The method we propose here is based on linear operation that requires low power and has very small foot-print that satisfies the major needs to be the choice of a switching scheme for integrated optics.