We take a look back today at one of the landmark papers in plasmonics applied to switching in the telecom wavelength. 15-nm-long and 8-um wide gold stripes are embedded in a polymer where they are heated by electrical contacts.  The stripes are arranged into Mach-Zender interferometers, measning that a small phase shift along one of the arms of this interferometer results in a large modulation intensity.  One of the interestesting things about this type of device is that it works in a large range of wavelengths and powers -- in this paper, the group demonstrates opeartion at 1.55um (interesting for telecom applications) and for powers from 10mW to 100mW.   Since modulation happens through rather slow thermal changes, the device is slow -- teh group measures response times of 1ms.  This drawback unfortunately makes this devices rather uninteresting for signal processing, The group speculates, however, that by taking advantage of a faster thermooptic coefficient in other materials, teh speed could be increased significantly -- although we’d still like to see thsi approach the speed of tens of GHz required in telecom today..  

 

We take a look back today at one of the landmark papers in plasmonics applied to switching in the telecom wavelength. 15-nm-long and 8-um wide gold stripes are embedded in a polymer where they are heated by electrical contacts.  The stripes are arranged into Mach-Zender interferometers, measning that a small phase shift along one of the arms of this interferometer results in a large modulation intensity.  One of the interestesting things about this type of device is that it works in a large range of wavelengths and powers -- in this paper, the group demonstrates opeartion at 1.55um (interesting for telecom applications) and for powers from 10mW to 100mW.   Since modulation happens through rather slow thermal changes, the device is slow -- teh group measures response times of 1ms.  This drawback unfortunately makes this devices rather uninteresting for signal processing, The group speculates, however, that by taking advantage of a faster thermooptic coefficient in other materials, teh speed could be increased significantly -- although we’d still like to see thsi approach the speed of tens of GHz required in telecom today..