
Chase Fagen

Designing Chip Scale Surface Plasmon Electro-Optic Devices
Authors
Chase Fagen
Mentor
Dr. Henry Zmuda
College
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
Abstract
<p>Plasmonics is a rapidly developing field on the boundary of optical and condensed matter physics. The creation of plasmonic devices is advantageous to society because they can transmit information at faster speeds compared to current electronic and photonic counterparts. Further, a plasmonic electro-optic modulator can be fabricated at the nanoscale. Therefore, plasmonic innovations offer subwavelength devices with improved performance with respect to size and power consumption. In a hypothesized plasmonic modulator design, surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), which are longitudinal electromagnetic waves that couple to a metal-dielectric interface, are generated by light incident on an annular array aperture. Perovskite ferroelectric materials such as Lanthanum Nickelate and Barium Titanate are thoughtfully chosen to construct the metal-dielectric interface due to their high dielectric constants and electric tunability. The waveguide design is achieved by using a focused ion beam to etch grating patterns into the nanoscale device to serve as a mechanism to couple light. The research findings, by means of preliminary device construction and numerical simulations, assert the previously mentioned advantages of high speed and high integration density that plasmonic devices exhibit. This revolutionary optical phenomenon will trailblaze technologies and innovations for years to come.</p>
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