Surface plasmon polariton waves with zero phase dispersion in a broad spectrum at Near-infrared wavelength

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dispersion engineering method for surface plasmon polariton waves that achieves broadband near-zero effective index with zero phase dispersion, enabling advanced photonic device applications.

Contribution

The paper develops a theoretical approach using asymmetric planar photonic crystals to control SPP dispersion and maintain zero phase dispersion through parity-time symmetry.

Findings

Validated with FDTD simulations and band structure calculations.

Achieves alternating positive and negative effective indices.

Potential applications in metamaterials and photonic devices.

Abstract

We present theory to describe an engineering dispersion technique to obtain a broadband effective index near zero with an asymmetric planar photonic crystal. The theory provides the manipulating surface plasmon polariton (SPP) to provide alternating symmetric stacks of negative and positive effective indices. The odd alternating effective indices, including positive and negative refraction, arise from transverse resonance that depends on the geometry of the planar photonic crystal. The purposed technique remains wavepacket in zero phase dispersion since the created parity-time symmetries keep the phase constant in propagation direction. We use the plane wave expansion method to calculate band structure and transmission spectrum then validate with FDTD simulation. The results are compared to the recent experimental reports and they will be of significant interest to emerging applications in designing and fabricating metamaterials, optical filters, photonic sensors, photonic integrated circuits, near-field optics, and optofluidic biosensing applications.