Development and Application of Surface Plasmon Polaritons on Optical Amplification
Figure 12
(a) The plasmonic laser consists of a CdS semiconductor nanowire on top of a silver substrate separated by a nanoscale MgF2 layer of thickness h. This structure supports a new type of plasmonic mode, the mode size of which can be a hundred times smaller than a diffraction-limited spot. The inset shows a scanning electron microscope image of a typical plasmonic laser, which has been sliced perpendicular to the nanowire’s axis to show the underlying layers. (b) The stimulated electric field distribution and direction of a hybrid plasmonic mode at a wavelength of 489 nm, corresponding to the CdS I2 excitonline. The cross-sectional field plots (along the broken lines in the field map) illustrate the strong overall confinement in the gap region between the nanowire and metal surface with sufficient modal overlap in the semiconductor to facilitate gain.
