Gain-assisted slow to superluminal group velocity manipulation in nano-waveguides

Abstract

We study the energy propagation in subwavelength waveguides and demonstrate that the mechanism of material gain, previously suggested for loss compensation, is also a powerful tool to manipulate dispersion and propagation characteristics of electromagnetic pulses at the nanoscale. We show theoretically that the group velocity in lossy nano-waveguides can be controlled from slow to superluminal values by the material gain and waveguide geometry and develop an analytical description of the relevant physics. We utilize the developed formalism to show that gain-assisted dispersion management can be used to control the transition between ``photonic-funnel'' and ``photonic-compressor'' regimes in tapered nano-waveguides. The phenomenon of strong modulation of group velocity in subwavelength structures can be realized in waveguides with different geometries, and is present for both volume and surface-modes.

Some changes in the abstract and Fig.1. No results affected

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Active metamaterials: sign of refraction index and gain-assisted dispersion management
• From Slow to Superluminal Propagation: Dispersive Properties of Surface Plasmon Polaritons in Linear Chains of Metallic Nanospheroids
• Low-loss nonlinear polaritonics
• Gain-assisted superluminal light propagation via incoherent pump field