Liquid-Crystal Active Tamm-Plasmon Devices

Abstract

For the surface electronic states of a metal, the Tamm plasmonic (TP) mode can be excited without an additional phase-matching component, but in a typical device the TP resonance wavelength is fixed, which is quite limiting. This work develops an approach to tuning TP resonance by incorporating a thin layer of liquid crystal (LC) into the design. Here phase retardation by the LC layer is an ensemble effect, due to the entire layer, not just the molecules at the metal's surface, as in devices based on surface-plasmon polaritons (SPPs). Also unlike SPP systems, the proposed structure is highly amenable to mature thin-film processing, for scalability to lengths of several meters.