Optical Forces in Hybrid Plasmonic Waveguides

Abstract

We demonstrate that in a hybrid plasmonic system the optical force exerted on a dielectric waveguide by a metallic substrate is enhanced by more than 1 order of magnitude compared to the force between a photonic waveguide and a dielectric substrate. A nanoscale gap between the dielectric waveguide and the metallic substrate leads to deep subwavelength optical energy confinement with ultralow mode propagation loss and hence results in the enhanced optical forces at low input optical power, as numerically demonstrated by both Maxwell's stress tensor formalism and the coupled mode theory analysis. Moreover, the hybridization between the surface plasmon modes and waveguide modes allows efficient optical trapping of single dielectric nanoparticle with size of only several nanometers in the gap region, manifesting various optomechanical applications such as nanoscale optical tweezers. © 2011 American Chemical Society.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Hybrid Plasmonic Waveguide; Optical Force; Optical Trapping; Surface Plasmon Polariton

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1530-6984

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2011 American Chemical Society (ACS), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2011

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