Importance of FDTD in plasmonic devices

Abstract

Development of integrated electronic and photonic circuits has led to distinctive data processing and transport capabilities. Scaling these devices to smaller and smaller dimension make these devices not only faster, power efficient and inexpensive components, but also lead to new challenges. A very important challenge is the growing size mismatch between photonic and electronic elements. To overcome this hurdle a new device technology, Plasmonic, is quickly becoming a dominant technology, which can facilitate information between integrated nanoscale components at optical frequencies by forming a medium between nano-electronic and micro-photonics. In this paper, Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD), a universal brute-force numerical method in optics and electromagnetism is studied, which is used to analyze the plasmonic devices. FDTD method is aimed to solve Maxwell's equations by discretising both in space and time domain.