Plasmonic coupler based on the nanoslit with bump

In this paper, we propose a plasmonic coupler which is composed of a nanoslit with a bump. The slit is used to generate surface plasmon polariton (SPP), and the bump is employed as a SPP reflector. It is found that the phase difference between the SPP propagating the opposite direction to the bump and the one reflected by the bump can be periodically adjusted by the distance between the center of slit and the bump. When the constructive interference between the two SPPs occurs, the proposed structure can be regarded as a undirectional plasmonic coupler. Moreover, we also find that the propagation of the interfering SPPs is influenced by the width and length of bump. It is expected that our results may be utilized to control the electromagnetic wave in subwavelength optics. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.