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Physical review. B, Condensed matter

Exact results on optical bistability with surface plasmons in layered media

G. S. Agarwal, Subhasish Dutta Gupta

Published Oct 15, 1986• 37 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical bistability with surface plasmons in layered structures on a nonlinear substrate is studied using Leung's exact results for the nonlinear p-polarized surface waves. Explicit results for the bistable behavior of the reflected field are given for two different geometries involving excitation of short-range and long-range surface plasmons. The excitation of long-range plasmons results in a much lower bistability threshold.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.34.5239

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Optical bistability with surface plasmons in layered structures on a nonlinear substrate is studied using Leung's exact results for the nonlinear p-polarized surface waves. Explicit results for the bistable behavior of the reflected field are given for two different geometries involving excitation of short-range and long-range surface plasmons. The excitation of long-range plasmons results in a much lower bistability threshold.
Wysin et al1 suggested that the local field enhancement near a metal surface which occurs if surface plasmons are excited in a metal film, can be useful for observing optical bistability arising from the nonlinearity of the Kerr medium. Other geometrical arrangements2 have also been suggested. These studies assume plane waves in the nonlinear medium and use the Fresnel formulae for reflection and refraction from a layered medium but with linear refractive index replaced by the nonlinear refractive index. This assumes that the fields in the medium are homogeneous. However if surface plasmons are excited, then the fields are inhomogeneous and one has the problem of reflection and refraction from an inhomogeneous layered medium. The inhomogeneity is to be determined self consistently. Thus a proper treatment of optical bistability with surface plasmons should use the nonlinear solutions of the wave equation in Kerr medium. This is what we do in this paper.
We consider an attenuated total reflection prism-coupling geometry used to excite surface-plasmon waves along a metal film, bounded by a substrate with an intensity-dependent dielectric constant. Nonlinear wave theory is developed in the infinite incident plane-wave approximation, assuming a dielectric constant proportional to the square of the electric field normal to the film. We calculate the intensity required to observe bistability in the reflected intensity by excitation of the nonlinear, long-range surface plasmon and find it to be 2 orders of magnitude less than that required for the nonlinear, single-surface plasmon. We compare the nonlinear wave analysis with other approaches and illustrate the effects of the sign of the nonlinearity and of a nonlinear coupling layer.