Tailoring and cancelling dispersion of slow or stopped and subwavelength surface-plasmonodielectric-polaritonic light

• Main Authors: Soljacic, Marin (Contributor), Karalis, Aristeidis (Contributor), Joannopoulos, John (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics (Contributor), Joannopoulos, John D. (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, 2010-04-08T14:50:37Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

A new physical mechanism enabling simultaneous cancellation of group-velocity and attenuation dispersion to extremely high orders for subwavelength light of any small positive, negative or zero value of the group velocity is introduced. It exploits the unique dispersive properties of the surface polaritons supported by a novel proposed material platform of multilayered Surface-PlasmonoDielectric-Polaritonic (SPDP) systems. These single-polarization broadband-slow- or stopped-light systems are thus essentially free from all kinds of dispersion and could therefore have great impact on the technology of integrated nanophotonics, for example in the design of efficient and very compact delay lines and active devices. The same dispersion-manipulation mechanism can be employed to invent a large variety of exotic slow-light dispersion relations.
United States. Army Research Office. Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Contract No. W911NF-07-D-0004)
MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation (Grant No. DMR 02-13282)