Plasmonic communications : light on a wire

The emerging field of plasmonics promises the generation, processing, transmission, sensing and detection of signals at optical frequencies along metallic surfaces much smaller than the wavelengths they carry. Plasmonic technology has applications in a wide range of fields, including biophotonics, sensing, chemistry and medicine. But perhaps the area where it will have the most profound impact is in optical communications, since plasmonic waves oscillate at optical frequencies and thus can carry information at optical bandwidths

Slow-light dark solitons in insulator-insulator-metal plasmonic waveguides

The potential of slow-light propagation in an insulator-insulator-metal plasmonic waveguide is studied. Due to the high dispersion of the device in the frequency region where the signal group velocity is low, slow-light optical pulses broaden in time and intersymbol interference occurs, limiting the achievable data rates and transmission distance. In order to overcome this problem, we analytically and numerically investigate slow dark solitons in the normal dispersion regime of the waveguide. The storing capability of the waveguide is analyzed from an application point of view. © 2010 Optical Society of America

Dark solitons in discrete lattices: Saturable versus cubic nonlinearities

In the present work, we study dark solitons in dynamical lattices with the saturable nonlinearity and compare them to those in lattices with the cubic nonlinearity. This comparison has become especially relevant in light of recent experimental developments in the former context. The stability properties of the fundamental waves, for both onsite and intersite modes, are examined analytically and corroborated by numerical results. Our findings indicate that for both models onsite solutions are stable for sufficiently small values of the coupling between adjacent nodes, while intersite solutions are always unstable. The nature of the instability (which is oscillatory for onsite solutions at large coupling and exponential for inter-site solutions) is probed via the dynamical evolution of unstable solitary waves through appropriately crafted numerical experiments; typically, these computations result in dynamic motion of the originally stationary solitary waves. Another key finding, consistent with recent experimental results, is that the instability growth rate for the saturable nonlinearity is found to be smaller than that of the cubic case. © 2007 The American Physical Society

Discrete vector solitons in one-dimensional lattices in photorefractive media

We construct families of two-component spatial solitons in a one-dimensional lattice with saturable on-site nonlinearity (focusing or defocusing) in a photorefractive crystal. We identify 14 species of vector solitons, depending on their type (bright/dark), phase (in-phase/staggered), and location on the lattice (on/off-site). Two species of the bright/bright type form entirely stable soliton families, four species are partially stable (depending on the value of the propagation constant), while the remaining eight species are completely unstable. "Symbiotic" soliton pairs (of the bright/dark type), which contain components that cannot exist in isolation in the same model, are found as well. © 2006 The American Physical Society

Plasmonic communications : light on a wire

The emerging field of plasmonics promises the generation, processing, transmission, sensing and detection of signals at optical frequencies along metallic surfaces much smaller than the wavelengths they carry. Plasmonic technology has applications in a wide range of fields, including biophotonics, sensing, chemistry and medicine. But perhaps the area where it will have the most profound impact is in optical communications, since plasmonic waves oscillate at optical frequencies and thus can carry information at optical bandwidths