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We demonstrate a water cladded plasmo-photonic waveguide, by exploiting the directional coupling scheme to vertically divert light from a 360 × 800 nm (height × width) Si3N4 waveguide to a plasmonic slot waveguide, enabling the excitation of a pure plasmonic mode within a 210-nm-wide slot at 1550 nm. The 150-nm-thick plasmonic slot waveguide was deposited on the top of an oxide cladded Si3N4 waveguide exhibiting an experimental plasmonic-to-photonic insertion loss of 2.24 ± 0.3 dB and a plasmonic propagation length (Lspp) of 10.8 μm at 1550 nm. The proposed plasmo-photonic waveguide holds a promise as an optical transducer element for highly sensitive and low-cost interferometric biosensors due to the significant phase change achieved per unit propagation length.

We theoretically investigate spontaneous emission of a quantum (3D) dipolar emitter located near a (2D) plasmonic waveguide of arbitrary form. The channels into which emitter couples (plasmon, scattering, electron-hole pairs creation) are well identified.

We present recent work that is carried out within the FP7 project PLATON on novel Tb/s switch fabric architectures and technologies for optical interconnect applications, employing heterointegration of plasmonics, silicon photonics and electronics.

Surface plasmon based photonic devices are promising candidates for highly integrated optics. A surface plasmon (SP) is basically an electromagnetic wave confined in the interface between a metal and a dielectric, and is due to the interaction of the electromagnetic field with the surface bounded electron charges in the metal. A SP can propagate along the interface where it is confined (the propagation length being tens of micrometers in the visible range), but its associated electromagnetic field decreases exponentially in the perpendicular direction, in such a way that this vertical confinement makes SP very attractive for the design of optical devices in coplanar geometry. An important effort in the development of SP based photonic devices is necessarily dedicated to the design of systems allowing the control of SP propagation in two dimensions. Recently, it has been shown that Bragg mirrors consisting of gratings of metallic lines or indentations on a metallic surface are very efficient tools to perform this task. Up to now, the general performance of these systems has been characterized, but there are however important aspects in their behaviour that have not yet been analyzed. In this work we study, by means of leakage radiation (LR) measurements, the angular acceptance of these mirrors as a function of the angle of incidence. We have found that the angular acceptance decreases significantly when the angle for which the mirror is designed increases. To understand this fact, the dispersion relations of SP propagating on corrugated surfaces have been obtained by LR in the Fourier plane and compared to simulations based on the differential method. Our results show that the width of the bandgap is reduced for higher angles between the grating and the SP propagation direction.

An overview of plasmon optics (surface plasmons) is discussed. Its basic functionalities such as Bragg mirrors or filters, that are already demonstrated by prototypes of plasmonic nanodevices are also presented.