Electromigrated electrical optical antennas for transducing electrons and photons at the nanoscale.

Electrically controlled optical metal antennas are an emerging class of nanodevices enabling a bilateral transduction between electrons and photons. At the heart of the device is a tunnel junction that may either emit light upon injection of electrons or generate an electrical current when excited by a light wave. The current study explores a technological route for producing these functional units based upon the electromigration of metal constrictions.

Broadband etching-free metal grating couplers embedded in titanium dioxide waveguides.

Metal grating couplers embedded into a titanium dioxide layer are proposed. A coupling efficiency better than 20% is experimentally demonstrated with a 3 dB bandwidth of 86 nm which is in agreement with simulation results. This allowed us to perform error-free transmissions of 10 Gbit/s wavelength multiplexed signals in the C-band.

Evaluating plasmonic transport in current-carrying silver nanowires.

Plasmonics is an emerging technology capable of simultaneously transporting a plasmonic signal and an electronic signal on the same information support. In this context, metal nanowires are especially desirable for realizing dense routing networks. A prerequisite to operate such shared nanowire-based platform relies on our ability to electrically contact individual metal nanowires and efficiently excite surface plasmon polaritons in this information support.