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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO.

2, JANUARY 15, 2007 91

Surface Plasmon Bragg Gratings Formed in


Metal-Insulator-Metal Waveguides
Zhanghua Han, Erik Forsberg, Member, IEEE, and Sailing He, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—We propose and numerically analyze surface plasmon


Bragg gratings formed by a periodic variation of the width of the
insulator in a metal-insulator-metal waveguide. The results indi-
cate that very good filtering characteristics can be achieved in these
plasmonic Bragg gratings. To suppress the sidelobes in the trans-
mission spectrum, we further propose S-shaped Bragg cells and
find better performance. By introducing a defect into the grating,
a defect state with high -value is introduced into the bandgap and
a Fabry–Pérot-like structure is formed.
Index Terms—Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide, surface
plasmon, waveguide Bragg grating (WBG).

I. INTRODUCTION
Fig. 1. Real part of the effective refractive index of an MIM waveguide as a
function of width of the insulator at free space wavelength of 1550 nm. Inset:
SURFACE plasmon polariton (SPP) [1] is an electro-
A magnetic excitation at the interface of a noble metal
and a dielectric, which can be utilized to manipulate light at
schematic picture of an MIM waveguide, where the insulator (white) is em-
bedded between two metal sheets (gray). In this letter, the insulator is assumed
to be air and the metal silver.
a subwavelength scale. As present-day advanced processing
techniques allow for the fabrication of subwavelength pho- II. DESIGN AND NUMERICAL RESULTS
tonic devices, the utilization of SPPs opens up a multitude
of possibilities for the next generation of photonic integrated
circuits. By now, a fairly large family of SPP subwavelength The dispersion relation of an MIM (the schematic of which
optical devices, such as mirrors [2], waveguides [3], directional is shown as an inset of Fig. 1) is governed by the following
couplers, and Mach–Zehnder interferometers [4] as well as dispersion equation:
modulators [5] have been proposed in the literature.
Planar SPP waveguides are mainly classified into (1)
two categories, insulator-metal-insulator (IMI)-type and
metal-insulator-metal (MIM)-type. Although IMI structures where and are the dielectric constants of the insulator and
have less loss, and thus longer propagation length, it has been the metal, respectively. is the width of the inner insulator.
shown that these structures suffer greatly from their poor and are the transverse propagation constants in the insulator
ability of confining light into subwavelength geometries [6]. and the metal, respectively, which are related to the effective
MIM-type waveguides have been shown to be the most efficient index of refraction as
for subwavelength manipulation of light with an acceptable
propagation length [6]. IMI-type Bragg gratings have recently
(2)
been reported in the literature [7], but in this letter, we propose
an MIM-type Bragg grating.
where is the propagation constant in vacuum.
It is straightforward to see from (1) that the characteristics
Manuscript received August 2, 2006; revised October 29, 2006. This work of light propagating through an MIM waveguide, e.g., effective
was supported by the National Basic Research Program (2004CB719800)
and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60688401 and
index, are controlled by the permittivity of the metal layers and
60677047). The work of E. Forsberg was supported by the Swedish Strategic the insulator as well as the width of the insulator; i.e., it is pos-
Research Foundation and by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation sible to control the light propagation by altering at least one of
Systems. these parameters. In this letter, we propose and analyze an SPP
The authors are with the Centre for Optical and Electromagnetic Re-
search, Zhejiang University; Joint Research Center of Photonics of the waveguide Bragg grating formed by periodically varying the
Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Zhejiang University, Zhejiang width of the insulator layer in the MIM waveguide. A similar
University, Hangzhou 310058, China (e-mail: zhanghua@coer.zju.edu.cn; grating can also be achieved by periodically changing the per-
erikf@zju.edu.cn; sailing@zju.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
mittivity of the metal layers as was recently proposed by Wang
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. et al. [8]. However, as will be shown below, our approach is su-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2006.889036 perior in achievable performance as well as feasibility.
1041-1135/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
92 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, JANUARY 15, 2007

Fig. 3. Transmission spectra for an SPP-WBG with rectangular (rect 14 and


Fig. 2. (a) Schematics of an SPP-WBG. By periodically modulating the 17) and S-shaped Bragg (S14 and S17) cells for the cases of 14 and 17 sections
width of the insulator slot in an MIM-type waveguide, spectral filtering can be calculated using FDTD. See text for details.
achieved in analogy with FBGs. By introducing a defect into the SPP-WBG,
a Fabry–Pérot-like structure is formed. The schematics of Bragg cells having
rectangular and S-shaped sections are shown in (b) and (c), respectively. 660 and 292 nm, respectively. The transmission spectra of the
width and width equal 150 and 100 nm, respectively, throughout the letter. SPP-WBG are shown in Fig. 3. The asymmetry in the spectra
is mainly due to the fact that the metal is strongly dispersive as
In the MIM SPP waveguide studied in this letter, we assume compared to the dielectric and does not have a significant depen-
the metal to be silver whose permittivity is characterized by the dence on the losses. Simulations assuming zero loss have been
Drude model done to confirm this. These simulations also show that losses
have a limited influence on characteristics such as bandwidth
and minimum transmission. These characteristics are mainly in-
(3) fluenced by the number of periods and the index contrast. It
should also be mentioned that in contrast to [7], out-of-plane
scattering is not a significant contributing factor to the loss in
where is the interband-transition contribution to the permit- the MIM waveguide geometry.
tivity, the bulk plasma frequency, and the electron collision It is clear that this SPP-WBG shows nice filtering char-
frequency. By choosing the parameters of (3) to be , acteristics, with a large bandgap and near-zero transmission
eV, and eV, the resultant permittivity around the central wavelength. However, the spectrum also
will be consistent [9] with experimental data [10]. We further displays rather large sidelobes. Additional simulations show
assume the insulator layer to be air. Fig. 1 plots the real part of that increasing the number of periods will, while decreasing the
the effective index of refraction versus the width of the air slot transmission around the central wavelength, further pronounce
at the free-space wavelength 1550 nm. The plot shows that the the sidelobes. We attribute these sidelobes to the scattering of
effective refractive index is quite sensitive to the width of the light at the abrupt change in index of refraction between the
insulator layer, decreasing as the width increases. Thus, by pe- wider and narrower regions of the insulator layer. By intro-
riodically modulating this width, a Bragg grating can be formed. ducing a gradual change of the effective index of refraction
Given the analogy with fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), we label the sidelobes can be reduced. In Fig. 2(c), we propose a new
such SPP waveguide Bragg gratings SPP-WBGs, the schematics S-shaped Bragg cell wherein the width of wider section changes
of which are shown in Fig. 2(a). gradually. Thus, as the width changes gradually, so does the
For the SPP-WBG depicted in Fig. 2(a), the Bragg condition effective index.
is formulated as Fig. 3 shows calculated transmission spectra of an SPP-WBG
consisting of 14 and 17 periods of S-shaped Bragg cells. We
(4)
see that the sidelobes are quite suppressed, albeit at the ex-
where is the free-space propagation constant of incident light pense of a somewhat reduced transmission minima around the
and is an integer. and are the respective lengths center wavelength. As seen, this can however be improved by
indicated in Fig. 2. and are the effective refractive in- increasing the cell numbers, which in this case will not induce
dexes for the narrower and wider sections of the insulator in larger sidelobes. This is another advantage of these kinds of
the WBG. Satisfaction of condition (4) will have as a result Bragg cells.
that light propagation through the SPP-WBG will be prohib- Fig. 4 plots the magnetic field distribution inside the
ited. To validate this, we use the finite-difference time-domain SPP-WBG with 14 periods of rectangular Bragg cells at inci-
method (FDTD) [11] to simulate light propagation through the dent wavelengths 1900 and 1550 nm. It is clear that the former
SPP-WBG. Other methods to simulate such a structure would wavelength, which is outside the bandgap, is transmitted and the
be possible, e.g., a transfer matrix approach, however, this is latter, which is inside, is not, giving a straightforward illustra-
not a suitable method for the S-shaped Bragg cells (discussed tion of the filtering characteristic.
below). and are determined by the first-order To further investigate the property of these SPP-WBGs, we
Bragg condition for the incident wavelength of 1550 nm to be construct a cavity by introducing a defect into an SPP-WBG
HAN et al.: SURFACE PLASMON BRAGG GRATINGS FORMED IN MIM WAVEGUIDES 93

III. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION


To summarize, we have in this letter proposed and numeri-
cally analyzed surface plasmon WBGs formed in MIM waveg-
uides with a periodic variation of the width of the insulator. We
have also introduced a way to optimize the transmission spec-
trum of the device by using a gradual change of the effective
index of refraction by introducing S-shaped Bragg cells.
H
Fig. 4. Magnetic field ( ) distribution inside an SPP-WBG with 14 periods Compared with the structure proposed by Wang et al., our
of rectangular Bragg cells having filter characteristics as shown by the corre- structure shows better performance in terms of, e.g., lower
sponding (rect 14) curve in Fig. 3. Incident wavelength: (a) 1900 nm (outside sidelobes in the transmission spectrum (even with rectangular
the bandgap) and (b) 1550 nm (inside the bandgap).
Bragg cells) and larger -value of the cavity. More importantly
though, our structure can easily be fabricated by evaporating a
metal film on the dielectric and then patterning the waveguide
structure in a resist using e-beam lithography. The pattern
would then be transferred to the metal film through etching.
The Wang structure on the other hand requires several lithog-
raphy and etching steps as well as a second metal evaporation,
all of which will require very high precision in alignment etch
during the fabrication. Furthermore, our approach allows for
optimization of the transmission spectrum by use of S-shaped
Bragg cells as discussed above, something that would be
impossible to implement in the Wang approach.
To conclude, we anticipate that SPP-WBGs such as these may
find applications in nanophotonics in a similar way as FBGs do
in classical optics, potentially as filters for WDM applications.
The SPP-WBGs discussed in this letter can, together with com-
patible SPP components, form the basis for future photonic in-
Fig. 5. Transmission spectrum of an SPP-WBG including a defect with length
728 nm. The SPP-WBG has eight S-shaped Bragg cells on both sides of the tegrated circuits.
defect.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Z. Han and E. Forsberg would like to thank Dr. D. Dai,
L. Liu, and H. Fu both at Zhejiang University (China) as well
as Dr. L. Wosinski and Dr. E. Berglind at the Royal Institute of
Technology (Sweden) for valuable discussions.

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