Hybrid plasmonic waveguide for integrated photonic signal processing

信息的快速处理是现代社会的核心。这项任务传统上是由电子设备完成的，但对于某些任务来说，电子设备正变得太慢和太耗能。在替代技术中，光学技术是最有前途的，因为它速度快，潜在的能源效率高，但可能的光学解决方案要么相当庞大，要么遭受高欧姆损失，因为光需要通过金属。该项目旨在设计和制造一种发射一串短脉冲的设备，这是任何信号处理的关键要求，并且其中的光主要存在于低损耗材料中。通过仅使用金属来限制光线，这种“混合”装置将避免传统光子解决方案的缺点。

Fast processing of information is central to modern society. This task is traditionally carried out by electronics, which however is becoming too slow and energy-consuming for some tasks. Among alternative technologies optics is the most promising, because it is fast and potentially energy efficient, but possible optical solutions are either quite bulky or suffer from high ohmic losses because the light needs to travel through metal. This project aims to design and fabricate a device which emits a train of short pulses, a key requirement for any signal processing, and in which the light resides mostly in low-loss material. By using metals merely to confine the light, such a 'hybrid' device would avoid the drawbacks of traditional photonic solutions.