Control of plasmon dynamics in coupled plasmonic hybrid mode microcavities

Abstract

Hybrid plasmonic microcavities display localized electromagnetic states similar to the confined electronic levels in atoms and quantum wells. Exploiting this parallelism and concepts used in photonics, we describe a novel plasmonic device based on the coupling between a plasmonic microcavity and a photonic microcavity. We theoretically analyze the coupling effects and the plasmon dynamics in structures integrated in silicon optical waveguides. We observe a strong coupling behavior between the eigenmodes that leads to a periodic excitation of the plasmonic hybrid mode in analogy to a plasmonic pulsar. We demonstrate that the spectra-and thus the dynamics-of confined plasmons can be tailored with great versatility in plasmonic pulsars in the 100-fs scale. These structures open new ways in the design and conception of plasmonic and photonic applications and the control and manipulation of hybrid plasmons in the time domain. © 2012 American Physical Society.