Integrated devices for active plasmonics and surface enhanced Raman scattering

Nanophotonic waveguides based on surface plasmons have experienced a rapid development in terms of their design, fabrication and understanding of their plasmonic properties. For eventual applications it will be crucial to efficiently interface these waveguides with fast electronics. Therefore, we have looked both into an efficient detection and generation of surface plasmons in deep-subwavelength plasmon waveguides. We have based this work on metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) waveguides, as these waveguides have been extensively investigated before and show promising properties in terms of field confinement and propagation lengths. We have coupled these waveguides to both integrated detectors and light-emitting diodes, resulting in scalable and potentially very fast transducers between the electronic and plasmonic domain. Moreover, we are currently working on active sources to generate coherent surface plasmons in these highly confined waveguides.