Optical intensity figures of merit of insulator-metal-insulator and metal-insulator-metal thin-film stacks
Résumé
Figures of merit (FoM) are used to characterise the mode intensity and leakage of reflection and plane-wave and locally excited transmitted fluxes of simple insulator-metal-insulator (IMI) and metal-insulator-metal (MIM) 2D planar thin-film stacks sustaining a single surface plasmon polariton (SPP) and multiple planar waveguide (PWG) modes. This first comparative study of the intensity FoM (IFoM) of IMI and MIM stack modes is carried out by analysing these observables 3D dispersion graph (observable dispersion/in-plane wave vector/frequency) along 2D cuts where one of the independent variables is fixed. In the spatial domain, the observable 2D dispersion curves along the in-plane wave vector at a given frequency are examined. In the frequency domain, these 2D dispersion curves are examined along the frequency at a given in-plane wave vector. Due to the lower leakage, the quality factors and IFoM of the IMI and MIM thin film stack modes are significantly larger in the spatial domain than in the frequency domain. Our optimized quality factors and IFoMs can be larger than those obtained in some 2D/3D nanoscale samples with an involved geometry.