All-plasmonic Optical Phased Array Integrated on a Thin-film Platform

Optical phased arrays have been demonstrated to enable a variety of applications ranging from high-speed on-chip communications to vertical surface emitting lasers. Despite the prosperities of the researches on optical phased arrays, presently, the reported designs of optical phased arrays are based on silicon photonics while plasmonic-based optical phased arrays have not been demonstrated yet. In this paper, a passive plasmonic optical phased array is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The beam of the proposed plasmonic optical phased array is steerable in the far-field area and a high directivity can be achieved. In addition, radio frequency phased array theory is demonstrated to be applicable to the description of the coupling conditions of the delocalized surface plasmons in optical phased arrays and thus the gap between the phased arrays at two distinctly different wavelengths can be bridged. The potential applications of the proposed plasmonic phased arrays include on-chip optical wireless nanolinks, optical interconnections and integrated plasmonic lasers.