Nonlinear Nanophotonic Circuitry: Tristable and Astable Multivibrators and Chaos Generator

摘要

The concept of lumped optical nanoelements (or metactronics), whereinnanometer-scale structures act as nanoinductors, nanocapacitors, andnanoresistors, has attracted a great deal of attention as a simple toolbox forengineering different nanophotonic devices in analogy with microelectronics.While recent studies of the topic have been predominantly focused on linearfunctionalities, nonlinear dynamics in microelectronic devices plays a crucialrole and provides a majority of functions, employed in modern applications.Here, the metactronics paradigm is extended and nonlinear dynamicalmodalities are added to those nanophotonic devices that have never beenassociated with optical nanoantennas. Specifically, it is shown that nonlineardimer nanoantennae can operate in the regimes of tristable and astablemultivibrators as well as chaos generators. The physical mechanism behindthese modalities relies on the Kerr-type nonlinearity of nanoparticles in thedimer enhanced by a dipolar localized surface plasmon resonance. This allowsone to provide a positive nonlinear feedback at moderate optical intensities,leading to the desired dynamical behavior via tuning the driving fieldparameters. The findings shed light on a novel class of nonlinearnanophotonic devices with a tunable nonlinear dynamical response.