Toward an electrically pumped spaser

The use of surface plasmon polariton (SPP)-based waveguides can significantly reduce the size of optical interconnects, but the propagation length of SPPs is limited by Joule heating losses and does not exceed a few micrometers. In this paper, we present an SPP amplification scheme that utilizes compact electrical pumping and gives a possibility for designing really compact on-chip waveguides. Moreover, we demonstrate here numerically that this approach can be easily used to design an electrically pumped cw or pulsed spaser. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America