https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2020-100606-8
Regular Article
Symmetric and antisymmetric surface plasmon polariton solitons in a metal-dielectric-metal waveguide with incoherent pumping
School of Physics and Electronics, Shandong Normal University, 250014 Jinan, Shandong, P.R. China
a e-mail: tanch@sdnu.edu.cn
Received:
29
November
2019
Received in final form:
9
March
2020
Published online:
22
April
2020
We propose a scheme to realize stable linear and nonlinear propagation of symmetric and antisymmetric surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) solitons by doping ladder-type three-level quantum emitters into the middle layer of a metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) waveguide. In linear propagation regime, we show that both symmetric and antisymmetric SPPs can acquire a gain from electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect with an incoherent pumping. The EIT can be used not only to completely compensate the Ohmic loss in the metal but also to acquire a subluminal group velocity for the SPPs. We also show that in nonlinear propagation regime a huge enhancement of Kerr nonlinearity of the symmetric and antisymmetric SPPs can be obtained but with different incoherent pumping intensities. As a result, gain-assisted (1+1)-dimensional symmetric and antisymmetric subluminal surface polaritonic solitons may be produced based on the strong confinement of electric field in the MDM waveguide. Our study may have promising applications in light information processing and transmission at nanoscale level based on MDM waveguides.
Key words: Optical Phenomena and Photonics
© EDP Sciences / Società Italiana di Fisica / Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature, 2020