On-chip trans-dimensional plasmonic router

Abstract

Plasmons, as emerging optical diffraction-unlimited information carriers, promise the high-capacity, high-speed, and integrated photonic chips. The on-chip precise manipulations of plasmon in an arbitrary platform, whether two-dimensional (2D) or one-dimensional (1D), appears demanding but non-trivial. Here, we proposed a meta-wall, consisting of specifically designed meta-atoms, that allows the high-efficiency transformation of propagating plasmon polaritons from 2D platforms to 1D plasmonic waveguides, forming the trans-dimensional plasmonic routers. The mechanism to compensate the momentum transformation in the router can be traced via a local dynamic phase gradient of the meta-atom and reciprocal lattice vector. To demonstrate such a scheme, a directional router based on phase-gradient meta-wall is designed to couple 2D SPP to a 1D plasmonic waveguide, while a unidirectional router based on grating metawall is designed to route 2D SPP to the arbitrarily desired direction along the 1D plasmonic waveguide by changing the incident angle of 2D SPP. The on-chip routers of trans-dimensional SPP demonstrated here provide a flexible tool to manipulate propagation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and may pave the way for designing integrated plasmonic network and devices. © 2020 Shaohua Dong et al., published by De Gruyter. 2020.