Saturation of absorption in noble metal doped nanocomposite glass film excited by evanescent light field

摘要

A leaky-waveguide configuration is proposed for saturable absorbers. Evanescent field interactionnbetween the leaky-mode and the absorber layer reduces material degradation at high power levelsnwhile providing control over the interaction length and thus the modulation strength andnnonsaturable losses simply by tuning the coupling angle around the resonance of the leaky-mode.nThis concept was applied to a sol-gel silicon-dioxide glass film doped with gold nanoparticles.nSaturation of the surface plasmon resonance absorption was demonstrated with modulation depthsnof up to 34% achieved. © 2010 American Institute of Physics. u0004doi:10.1063/1.3529950