Design Modeling and Simulation of Plasmonic Structures and Devices

Abstract

The plasmonics is thriving due to the unique properties of surface plasmons. The surface newlineplasmon is the hybrid quanta resulting from the interaction of light photons with the coherent newlineoscillations of conduction electrons. The existence of nanometer scale photonic newlinecomponents/systems/devices like microscope, telescope, spectroscope, laser, and LED is newlineprimarily hindered due to the theoretical limit on the optical diffraction. The theoretical newlinediffraction limit dictates that, the resolution of an optical system would be limited to ~ and#955;, the newlinewavelength of light. For this reason, the optical diffraction limit has been the key bottleneck in newlinethe quest to design and fabricate the optical components/systems/devices with size comparable to newlinetheir electronic counterparts i.e., subwavelength size. This is the primary cause of size disparity newlinebetween photonic and electronic components. The researchers are still pondering upon solving newlinethe riddle of mitigating this problem. This has been prognosticated that the unique capabilities of newlinesurface plasmons can play a vital role in surpassing these limitations by focusing the light at newlinesubwavelength scale and generating gigantic electric field enhancement. Due to its unique newlinecapabilities, the plasmonics has found applications in multidisciplinary areas including but not newlinelimited to photophysics, photochemistry, photovoltaic, integrated circuits, molecular energy newlinetransfer, molecular junctions, metamaterials, biosensing, imaging, spectroscopy, lensing. The newlineplasmonic structures consisting of isolated metallic nanoparticles and their aggregates ingrained newlinein the dielectric material are very important, especially in securing large signal amplification for newlinewide ranging applications. In fact, the electromagnetic amplification due to localized surface newlineplasmons is used to improve; biological sensing, Raman spectroscopy, microscopy, medical newlineiv newlinediagnostics etc., to name only a few. newline