Perfect absorber supported by optical Tamm states in plasmonic waveguide

Based on a two-dimensional plasmonic metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) waveguide with a thin metallic layer and a dielectric photonic crystal in the core, a novel absorber at visual and near-infrared frequencies is presented. The absorber spectra and filed distributions are investigated by the transfer-matrix-method and the finite-difference time-domain method. Numerical results show that attributing to excitation of the optical Tamm states in the MDM waveguide core, the optical wave is trapped in the proposed structure without reflection and transmission, leading to perfect absorption as high as 0.991. The proposed absorber can find useful application in all-optical integrated photonic circuits. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America