ABSTRACT
The development of nanoelectronic integrated circuits is approaching a bottleneck due to the limited operating speed and high power consumption. One critical building block to construct a plasmonic circuit is the plasmonic waveguide, which can be regarded as a nanoscale counterpart of an optical fiber that guides light with subwavelength confinement of the optical field. This chapter focuses on metal NWs and simple networks for the construction of plasmonic integrated circuits. It talks about the experimental aspects about surface plasmon excitation and detection. The chapter presents the basic properties of surface plasmons in the NW waveguides, including SPP modes, propagation, group velocity, loss, emission, spin-dependent properties, and NW-emitter interactions. It describes the plasmonic devices and circuits made of metal NWs, including SPP routers and demultiplexers, SPP-interference-based logic gates, and hybrid plasmonic-photonic NW systems. The plasmon-exciton interaction in the coupled system of plasmonic waveguide and quantum emitter provides a new approach to manipulate the interaction of single photons/plasmons and quantum emitters.
