Guiding of terahertz photons in superconducting nano-circuits

Abstract

The field of plasmonics, as one of the fascinating areas of photonics, has received great attention for its capability of deep subwavelength confinement. We present a nanoscale plasmonic slot waveguide based on high transition temperature ($T_{c}$) superconductor Bi$_{2}Sr_{2}CaCu_{2}{O}_{8+\delta}$,(BSCCO). The effect of geometrical parameters on the modal properties of the BSCCO plasmonic slot waveguide and the thermal tuning of the modal properties of the waveguide are explored. It is shown that the rising of temperature results in increasing the mode effective refractive index in exchange for decreasing the propagation length of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). Our proposed plasmonic waveguide paves the way for the development of the BSCCO based THz photonic integrated circuity at the nanoscale.