Active plasmonics in WDM traffic switching applications

With metal stripes being intrinsic components of plasmonic waveguides, plasmonics provides a “naturally” energy-efficient platform for merging broadband optical links with intelligent electronic processing, instigating a great promise for low-power and small-footprint active functional circuitry. Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2012, Vol.2 (1), p.652-652, Article 652
Main Authors: Papaioannou, Sotirios, Kalavrouziotis, Dimitrios, Vyrsokinos, Konstantinos, Weeber, Jean-Claude, Hassan, Karim, Markey, Laurent, Dereux, Alain, Kumar, Ashwani, Bozhevolnyi, Sergey I., Baus, Matthias, Tekin, Tolga, Apostolopoulos, Dimitrios, Avramopoulos, Hercules, Pleros, Nikos
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/624/1075/187
639/624/399
639/624/400/1021
639/624/400/584
Circuits
Computer engineering
Energy
Energy efficiency
Equipment Design
Fiber Optic Technology - instrumentation
Fiber Optic Technology - methods
Functional anatomy
Humanities and Social Sciences
Interferometry - instrumentation
Interferometry - methods
multidisciplinary
Optics
Photonics
Polymers
Power
Propagation
Reproducibility of Results
Response time
Science
Silicon
Surface Plasmon Resonance - instrumentation
Surface Plasmon Resonance - methods
Telecommunications - instrumentation
Transducers
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Summary:With metal stripes being intrinsic components of plasmonic waveguides, plasmonics provides a “naturally” energy-efficient platform for merging broadband optical links with intelligent electronic processing, instigating a great promise for low-power and small-footprint active functional circuitry. The first active Dielectric-Loaded Surface Plasmon Polariton (DLSPP) thermo-optic (TO) switches with successful performance in single-channel 10 Gb/s data traffic environments have led the inroad towards bringing low-power active plasmonics in practical traffic applications. In this article, we introduce active plasmonics into Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) switching applications, using the smallest TO DLSPP-based Mach-Zehnder interferometric switch reported so far and showing its successful performance in 4×10 Gb/s low-power and fast switching operation. The demonstration of the WDM-enabling characteristics of active plasmonic circuits with an ultra-low power × response time product represents a crucial milestone in the development of active plasmonics towards real telecom and datacom applications, where low-energy and fast TO operation with small-size circuitry is targeted.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep00652