Plasmon-soliton waves in planar slot waveguides. II. Results for stationary waves and stability analysis

摘要

We describe the results of the two methods we developed to calculate the stationary nonlinear solutions in one-dimensional plasmonic slot waveguides made of a finite-thickness nonlinear dielectric core surrounded by metal regions. These two methods are described in detail in the preceding article [Walasik and Renversez, preceding paper, Phys. Rev. A93, 013825 (2016)]. For symmetric waveguides, we provide the nonlinear dispersion curves obtained using the two methods and compare them. We describe the well-known low-order modes and higher modes that were not described before. All the modes are classiffied into two families: modes with or without nodes. We also compare nonlinear modes with nodes with the linear modes in similar linear slot waveguides with a homogeneous core. We recover the symmetry breaking Hopf bifurcation of the first symmetric nonlinear mode toward an asymmetric mode and we show that some of the higher modes also exhibit a bifurcation. We study the behavior of the bifurcation of the fundamental mode as a function of the permittivities of the metal cladding and of the nonlinear core. We demonstrate that the bifurcation can be obtained at low power levels in structures with optimized parameters. Moreover, we provide the dispersion curves for asymmetric nonlinear slot waveguides. Finally, we give results concerning the stability of the fundamental symmetric mode and the asymmetric mode that bifurcates from it using both theoretical argument and numerical propagation simulations from two different full-vector methods. We also investigate the stability properties of the first antisymmetric mode using our two numerical propagation methods.