Transverse Anderson localization of channel plasmon polaritons

WoS Article

en

We studied numerically the effect of disorder on the propagation of the channel plasmon polaritons (CPP) in arrays of evanescently coupled rectangular grooves cut into the planar surface of metal in contact with vacuum or a dielectric medium. The grooves are assumed to be of the same width and depth while an off-diagonal disorder is introduced by randomly varying the distance between the grooves. To explore conditions under which transverse Anderson localization can be observed we employ a numerical technique based on the coupled mode theory. The distribution of the electric field of the CPP beam evaluated for a random system exhibits a transition from ballistic spreading of the CPP wave packets to transverse localization with an increasing disorder. We found that the interplay between the Ohmic losses and the coupling coefficients between the neighboring grooves plays a central role in realization of the transverse Anderson localization. We suggest two strategies, which are beneficial for its observation and discuss a potential impact of randomness on beam steering in the plasmonic nanodevices.

plasmonics; transverse Anderson localization; coupled mode theory

2018-08-06

2469-9926

PHYSICAL REVIEW A

98

2

023806-1–023806-8

8