Paper
23 February 2018 FDTD analysis of Aluminum/a-Si:H surface plasmon waveguides
Paulo Lourenço, Alessandro Fantoni, Miguel Fernandes, Yuri Vygranenko, Manuela Vieira
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The large majority of surface plasmon resonance based devices use noble metals, namely gold or silver, in their manufacturing process. These metals present low resistivity, which leads to low optical losses in the visible and near infrared spectrum ranges. Gold shows high environmental stability, which is essential for long-term operation, and silver’s lower stability can be overcome through the deposition of an alumina layer, for instance. However, their high cost is a limiting factor if the intended target is large scale manufacturing.

In this work, it is considered a cost-effective approach through the selection of aluminum as the plasmonic material and hydrogenated amorphous silicon instead of its crystalline counterpart. This surface plasmon resonance device relies on Fano resonance to improve its response to refractive index deviations of the surrounding environment. Fano resonance is highly sensitive to slight changes of the medium, hence the reason we incorporated this interference phenomenon in the proposed device.

We report the results obtained when conducting Finite-Difference Time Domain algorithm based simulations on this metal-dielectric-metal structure when the active metal is aluminum, gold and silver. Then, we evaluate their sensitivity, detection accuracy and resolution, and the obtained results for our proposed device show good linearity and similar parameter performance as the ones obtained when using gold or silver as plasmonic materials.
© (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Paulo Lourenço, Alessandro Fantoni, Miguel Fernandes, Yuri Vygranenko, and Manuela Vieira "FDTD analysis of Aluminum/a-Si:H surface plasmon waveguides", Proc. SPIE 10526, Physics and Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices XXVI, 105262D (23 February 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2290721
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KEYWORDS
Gold

Silver

Sensors

Metals

Refractive index

Aluminum

Waveguides

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