The term photonic crystals appears because of the analogy between electron waves in crystals and the light waves in artificial periodic dielectric structures. During the recent years the investigation of one-, two-and three-dimensional periodic structures has attracted a widespread attention of the world optics community because of great potentiality of such structures in advanced applied optical fields. The interest in periodic structures has been stimulated by the fast development of semiconductor technology that now allows the fabrication of artificial structures, whose period is comparable with the wavelength of light in the visible and infrared ranges.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6354/16969/00781867.pdf

Photonic crystals

Current medical imaging technologies allow visualization of tissue anatomy in the human body at resolutions ranging from 100 micrometers to 1 millimeter. These technologies are generally not sensitive enough to detect early-stage tissue abnormalities associated with diseases such as cancer and atherosclerosis, which require micrometer-scale resolution. Here, optical coherence tomography was adapted to allow high-speed visualization of tissue in a living animal with a catheter-endoscope 1 millimeter in diameter. This method, referred to as "optical biopsy," was used to obtain cross-sectional images of the rabbit gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts at 10-micrometer resolution.

In Vivo Endoscopic Optical Biopsy with Optical Coherence Tomography

Periodic structures of spherical silicon particles are analyzed using the coupled-dipole equations for studying optical response features and local electromagnetic fields. The model takes into account the electric and magnetic dipole moments of the particles embedded in a homogeneous dielectric medium. Particles with radius of 65 nm and larger are considered. It is shown that, due to the large permittivity of silicon, the first two Mie resonances are located in the region of visible light, where the absorption is small and the extinction is basically determined by scattering. The main contribution is given by the induced magnetic and electric dipoles of the particles. Thus, in contrast to metal particle arrays, here is a possibility to combine separately either the electric or magnetic dipole resonances of individual particles with the structural features. As a result, extinction spectra can have additional narrow resonant peaks connected with multiple light scattering by the magnetic dipoles and displaying a Fano-type resonant profile. Reflection and transmission properties of the Si particle arrays are investigated and the conditions of low light reflection and transmission by the particle arrays are discussed, as well as the applicability of the dipole approach. It is shown that the light transmission of finite-size arrays of Si particles can be significantly suppressed at the conditions of the particle magnetic dipole resonance. It is demonstrated that, using resonant conditions, one can separately control the enhancements of local electric and magnetic fields in the structures.

Optical response features of Si-nanoparticle arrays

Nanosystems with combined magnetic and plasmonic functionalities have in recent years become an active topic of research. By an adequate internal architecture of the constituting components, the magneto-optical activity of these systems can be greatly increased due to the electromagnetic field enhancement associated with the plasmon resonance. Simultaneously, the magnetic functionality permits the control of the plasmonic properties by an external magnetic field, which allows the development of active plasmonic devices. These materials find applications in, for example, gas and biosensing areas, and in integrated photonic devices for telecommunications. In the present work the state of the art and current understanding of the phenomenology associated with magnetoplasmonic structures where magnetism and plasmonics are intertwined are reviewed.

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Magnetoplasmonics: combining magnetic and plasmonic functionalities

Modern electronics based on semiconductors is meeting the fundamental speed limit caused by the interconnect delay and large heat generation when the sizes of components reach nanometer scale. Photons as a carrier of the information are superior to electrons in bandwidth, density, speed, and dissipation. More over, photons could carry intensity, polarization, phase, and frequency information which could break through the limitation of binary system as in electronic devices. But due to the diffraction limitation, the photonic components and devices can not be fabricated small enough to be integrated densely. Surface plasmon polariton is quanta of collective oscillations of free electrons excited by photons in metal nanostrucrures, which offers a promising way to manipulate light at the nanoscale and to realize the miniaturization of photonic devices. Hence, plasmonic circuits and devices have been proposed for some time as a potential strategy for advancing semiconductor-based computing beyond the fundamental performance limitations of electronic devices, as epitomized by Moore's law. A variety of individual plasmonic nanodevices have been intensively studied recently, but the crucial and necessary step to enable nanophotonic circuits for future information technology, namely cascade logics integrated on-chip, has not been achieved. Here we demonstrate that a nanophotonic binary logic NOR gate can be realized by cascading plasmonic OR and NOT gates in four-terminal nanowire networks. We explain the operating principle for the device based on quantum dot luminescence imaging, which reveal the interferences for different logic functions between propagating plasmon wave packets in the nanowire network in great detail. Since the NOR gate is logic complete, i.e. any Boolean logic gate can be constructed from it, our results could have a key role in defining a viable path for the development of novel subwavelength optical processor architectures.

Cascaded Logic Gates in Nanophotonic Plasmon Networks

We have proposed an ultracompact all-optical photonic crystal AND gate based on nonlinear ring resonators, consisting of two Kerr nonlinear photonic crystal ring resonators inserted between three parallel line defects. We have employed a Si nanocrystal as the nonlinear material for its appropriate nonlinear properties. The gate has been simulated and analyzed by finite difference time domain and plane wave expansion methods. The proposed logic gate can operate with a bit rate of about 120 Gbits/s.

All-optical ultracompact photonic crystal AND gate based on nonlinear ring resonators

Using dispersive finite-difference time-domain (D-FDTD) simulations, we show that a pair of gold nanodisks stacked in a 'sandwich'-like (end-fire) configuration produces a large enhancement of the magnetic field when irradiated with a plane optical wave, if the distance between the nanodisks is optically small. The effect, which can be rationalized in terms of a magnetic dipole resonance, is due the excitation of a hybridized asymmetric plasmon mode, in which the induced electrical dipoles in the two disks oscillate out-of-phase. The strong magnetic response, together with the simple morphology, suggests that Au nanosandwiches are suitable elementary building blocks for optical metamaterials that exhibit negative refraction.

Nosrat Granpayeh

Papers

All-optical ultracompact photonic crystal AND gate based on nonlinear ring resonators

Magnetic-field enhancement in gold nanosandwiches

Two bit all-optical analog-to-digital converter based on nonlinear Kerr effect in 2D photonic crystals

A nanoscale refractive index sensor in two dimensional plasmonic waveguide with nanodisk resonator

Improving the performance of a photonic crystal ring-resonator-based channel drop filter using particle swarm optimization method