Abstract Thanks to resonant characteristics of metallic nanoparticles, optical waves scattered from plasmonic nanoantennae can be well tailored in both amplitude and phase. We numerically demonstrate that, by varying the lengths and the lateral positions of gold nanorods in vicinity of a silicon waveguide, unidirectional emissions with typical forward–backward contrast ratio of 15 dB and directivity of 12 dB can be acquired in a plasmonic phased antenna array with sub-wavelength device length. The properties, i.e., the emission directionality and the size compactness, can be employed to control the far-field radiation pattern from a dielectric photonic circuit. Moreover, by altering the orientations of the dielectric waveguides decorated with plasmonic phased antenna arrays, we propose wireless light transportations in a layered photonic infrastructure, which may have applications in high-density photonic integrations.
Fund: Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2013CB632704), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11204366 and 61275044), and the Science Foundation of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. Y1K501DL11).
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