Design and analysis of an all optical OR gate using surface plasmon hopping along metallic nanorods

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel design technique for realization of plasmonic logic gates. A 2D plasmonic all optical OR gate with the miniaturized size of 5 μm × 3 μm is presented. Ag metallic reflectors form the input and output waveguides to confine the light inside the gate. The logic operations are realized through selective propagation of light in the gate through hopping of the surface plasmon resonances along the metallic nanorods. With this novel idea approximately 100% of input signal propagates through the output waveguide and no division occurs at the cross point. Due to its simplicity, the OR gate was chosen to be the first implemented logic gate to verify the performance of the proposed method. Our proposed optical gate works at the operating wavelength of 652 nm with input signals of a transverse magnetic (TM) (H z , E x , E y ) polarized continuous wave with near zero cross talk between two input waveguides.

Plasmonic circuits for manipulating optical information

“…Examples of photonic devices created for plasmons are shown in Figure 4 and include "Y" junctions for combining or separating plasmons [68][69][70][71][72], "X" junctions [70], proximity couplers [73], directional couplers [74] [73, [75][76][77][78], Bragg grating filters [69,79], add-drop filters [80], and ring resonators [69,79,81] that transmit or reflect plasmon waves depending on frequency and switching using phase shifts [82]. A novel plasmon filter was created using two wires of different materials joined together that provided a large electric permittivity mismatch resulting in unidirectional propagation [83].…”

Tunable transverse-electric surface plasmon polariton waves in a parallel-plate graphene-based waveguide

“…The research field of plasmonics [1,2] particularly metalbased plasmonic [3,4], and graphene plasmonic waveguides [5][6][7][8] is growing rapidly, involving the generation and propagation of surface plasmons (SPs) in linear and nonlinear media. SPs are coherent fluctuations of surface charge density between a conductor and a dielectric medium [9].…”