Tunable Optical Nanocavity of Iron-garnet with a Buried Metal Layer

• Published in: Materials Vol. 8; no. 6; pp. 3012 - 3023
• Main Authors: Kuz'michev, Alexey N, Kreilkamp, Lars E, Nur-E-Alam, Mohammad, Bezus, Evgeni, Vasiliev, Mikhail, Akimov, Iliya A, Alameh, Kamal, Bayer, Manfred, Belotelov, Vladimir I
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 2015; MDPI
• Subjects: Annealing; Electronic mail systems; Faraday effect; Garnets; gyrotropic media; Holes; Iron; metal nanocavity; Modulators; Morphology; Nanostructure; Noble metals; optical nanocavity; Optics; Oxidation; planar waveguides; Polishing; Quantum dots; Silver; surface plasmon-polariton; Wavelengths; Russia
• ISSN: 1996-1944; 1996-1944
• DOI: 10.3390/ma8063012

We report on the fabrication and characterization of a novel magnetophotonic structure designed as iron garnet based magneto-optical nanoresonator cavity constrained by two noble metal mirrors. Since the iron garnet layer requires annealing at high temperatures, the fabrication process can be rather challenging. Special approaches for the protection of metal layers against oxidation and morphological changes along with a special plasma-assisted polishing of the iron garnet layer surface were used to achieve a 10-fold enhancement of the Faraday rotation angle (up to 10.8\({\circ}/\mu\)m) within a special resonance peak of 12 nm (FWHM) linewidth at a wavelength of 772 nm, in the case of a resonator with two silver mirrors. These structures are promising for tunable nanophotonics applications, in particular, they can be used as magneto-optical (MO) metal-insulator-metal waveguides and modulators.